Immune responses to viruses like SARS-CoV-2 may affect mental health, and vice versa. Doctors are uncovering exactly how. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, one of the biggest questions was: Why do some people get so much sicker than others? It’s a question that has forced researchers to confront some deep mysteries of the human body, and come to conclusions that have startled them.
By the fall of 2020, psychiatrists were reporting that among the many groups who were high risk, people with psychiatric disorders, broadly, seemed to be getting more severe forms of Covid-19 at a higher rate. Katlyn Nemani, an NYU neuropsychiatrist, decided to dig deeper, asking: Just how much more at risk, and which conditions?
In January, she and a group of colleagues published a study of 7,348 Covid-19 patients in New York. One finding was stark: People with a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis faced more than two and a half times the average person’s risk of dying from Covid-19, even after controlling for the many other factors that affect Covid-19 outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking, obesity, and demographic factors — age, sex, and race.
“That was a pretty shocking finding,” Nemani says. The patients all were hospitalized in the same medical system, in the same region, which implies they weren’t receiving radically different treatments, she says. In sum, it all suggests that the risk was closely linked to the mental illness itself and not to some other variable.
Since then, more studies have come out — as well as meta–studies pooling the conclusions of those studies — showing worse Covid-19 outcomes among people with diagnosed mental health disorders including depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
Some of this isn’t surprising; a lot of people with mental health issues experience a general increased risk of poor health outcomes. But the pandemic started to shine a brighter light on why, bolstering a hypothesis that’s been accruing evidence in recent years.
It appears that something in the body, something biological associated with these disorders, may be at play. “That suggests there’s a physiologic vulnerability there in these folks,” said Charles Raison, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
It’s not necessarily that people with schizophrenia or mood disorders are more likely to become infected with Covid-19. Rather, once they are infected, “the outcomes are worse,” Nemani says. Depending on the study and the severity of the mental health diagnosis, people with these conditions are, roughly, between 1.5 and 2 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than average, after adjusting for other risk factors (unadjusted risk is even higher).
The level of increased risk, Nemani says, is “on par with what we’re seeing for other well-established risk factors like heart disease and diabetes.” What’s happening? Why would mental illness make someone more vulnerable to a respiratory disease? Psychiatrists who study these mental illnesses say the culprit might lie in a connection between mental health and the immune system.
They’re finding that mental health stressors could leave people more at risk for infection, and, most provocatively, they suspect that responses in the immune system might even contribute to some mental health issues.There’s a lot that’s unknown here. But the pandemic is giving researchers a new window into these questions. And the research “might teach us something about how to protect these people from infection going forward,” Nemani says.
How the immune system can impact mental health
In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its list of underlying conditions that put people at higher risk for severe Covid-19, adding mood disorders — like depression and bipolar disorder — and schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses, a group that accounts for around 34 million Americans. It was a recognition of the growing evidence published by Nemani and colleagues across medicine, and prioritizes this group for vaccines and booster shots.
Roger McIntyre, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto, is one of the co-authors of one of two systematic review studies that the CDC cited in its change. (Nemani is a co-author on the second.) To him, it’s no surprise that mental illness imparts an infection risk. “A thread that has been woven through many of these disorders is immune or inflammatory dysregulation,” McIntyre says.
That is, problems with the immune system tend to coincide with mental health issues. And problems with the immune system can lead people to have worse outcomes when it comes to SARS-CoV 2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
“Most of the time in medicine, it’s hard to have one singular explanation for anything,” he cautions. That’s especially true here in the discussion of why people with certain mental health issues might be more at risk for severe disease. People living with mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression tend to have shorter-than-average life spans and worse health overall….Continue reading
Nanotechnology is advancing so rapidly these days that it seems there is a new nanotech breakthrough being reported on a daily basis. Top researchers from around the world are using nanotechnology to solve problems once considered impossible, and are even discovering new and interesting properties in our material reality along the way.
2011 alone has seen some major advances in nanotechnology applied to the energy sector, and the promise nanotech holds for renewable energy is exactly what the budding market needs to eventually overtake fossil fuels as the energy generation mode of choice.
Super Efficient Solar Nantennas
University of Missouri researcher Patrick Pinhero and collaborators have developed microscopic antennas called, “nantennas,” that capture sunlight in both the visible and near-infrared spectrum as well as heat energy to create a thin-film solar sheet capable of 90 percent efficiency—far better than the 20 percent efficiency offered by current solar panels.
Energy Generation from Sound
Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University have created microscopic strings of zinc oxide that when exposed to sound vibrate between two electrodes, thus creating a charge. “Sound power can be used for various novel applications including cellular phones that can be charged during conversations and sound-insulating walls near highways that generate electricity from the sound of passing vehicles,” says lead researcher Dr. Sang-Woo Kim.
Energy Transmission Via Nanotubes
A never-before witnessed energy effect has been observed by MIT scientists working with carbon “nanotubes.” Apparently, heat waves travel through these microscopic tubes up to 10,000 times faster than normal while picking up ambient charged particles along the way, thus creating and electric charge. This offers untold potential in energy transmission.
Focusing Energy with Nanocones
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has created microscopic zinc oxide cones, dubbed “nanocones,” that exhibit the unique property of focusing and intensifying energy at the cones’ tips. The nanocones have been applied to solar cells to boost efficiency.
Storing Energy with Nanosponges
University of Texas researchers have created carbon nano-supercapacitors called “nanosponges” which are capable of storing static-electric energy in their sponge-like pores. Like traditional supercapacitors, nansponges can deliver energy faster and more efficiently than chemical-based batteries, but at a far higher capacity. Currently, the nanosponges can store the energy equivalent of a lead-acid battery, but material improvements could put them on par with lithium-ion very soon.
A new study from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine has found that 'de novo mutations' in a father's sperm can predict the risk of autism in a child (file image)
Mutations in a father’s sperm could predict the risk of a child being diagnosed with autism, a new study suggests. The genetic flaws, known as ‘de novo mutations’, can appear in a child’s DNA through problems with sperm production.
Researchers found that 15 percent of men with autistic children had these disease-causing mutations in their sperm.The team, from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, says the findings could lead to test in which fathers have their sperm screened to determine their future children’s risk of the developmental disorder.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder in which sufferers have a hard time communicating and with behavior.It encompasses several conditions – including autism and Asperger’s syndrome – and symptoms can range from mild to severe.
Children are usually diagnosed by age two after they exhibit signs such as reduced eye contact, not responding to their name and performing repetitive movements.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in 59 children has ASD.
Boys are much more likely – up to four times – to have the condition than girls. Despite decades of research, the causes of ASD remain a mystery. Both genetics and environmental factors are believed to play a role. However, recent studies have suggested that de novo mutations may be the cause of between 10 and 30 percent of ASD cases.
These mutations occur for the first time in a family member as the result of a mutation in the sperm or egg of a parent. For the study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, the team looked at the sperm of eight fathers who had children already diagnosed with ASD.
The sperm was analyzed for mosaicism, a condition in which a person has genetically different sets of cells within their body. ‘While medical textbooks teach us that every cell in the body has an identical copy of DNA, this is fundamentally not correct,’ said first author Dr Martin Breuss, an assistant project scientist at UC San Diego Health Sciences.
‘Mutations occur every time a cell divides, so no two cells in the body are genetically identical.’ Mosaicism occurs in an unborn baby’s early developmental stages after an error in cell division. ‘[It] can cause cancer or can be silent in the body. If a mutation occurs early in development, then it will be shared by many cells within the body,’ said Dr Breuss.
‘But if a mutation happens just in sperm, then it can show up in a future child but not cause any disease in the father.’Disease-causing mutations were found in about 15 percent of the fathers’ sperm cells, the researchers said.
‘My laboratory has a long-standing interest in understanding the origins of pediatric brain disease, and how mutations contributes to disease in a child,’ said co-senior study author Dr Joseph Gleeson, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
‘We previously showed that mosaicism in a child can lead to diseases like epilepsy. Here, we show that mosaicism in one of parents is at least as important when thinking about genetic counseling.’
The researchers say their findings could be developed into a clinical test that fathers could undergo to test the risk of recurrence in future children or for men who haven’t had children yet but want to know the risk.
In the two decades since it was first included in products available to the general public, Bluetooth has become so widespread that an entire generation of consumers may not be able to remember a time without it.
ABI Research estimates that 5 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices will ship to consumers this year, with that figure expected to rise to 7 billion by 2026. Bluetooth is now in everything from smartphones to refrigerators to lightbulbs, allowing a growing number of products to connect to each other seamlessly — sometimes.
Despite its pervasiveness, the technology is still prone to headache-inducing issues, whether it’s the struggle to set up a new device to connect with, switching headphones between devices or simply being too far out of range to connect.
“I have a very love-hate relationship with Bluetooth,” said Chris Harrison, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Melon University. “Because when it works, it’s amazing, and when it doesn’t, you want to rip your hair out.”
“The promise was to make it as seamless and easy as possible,” he said. “Bluetooth never quite got there, unfortunately.”
The reasons for this go back to the very foundation of the relatively low-cost technology.
The rise of Bluetooth
Bluetooth is said to borrow its name from a ninth-century Scandinavian king, Harald “Blue tooth” Gormsson, who was known for his blueish-gray dead tooth and also for uniting Denmark and Norway in 958 AD. Early programmers adopted “Bluetooth” as a code name for their wireless tech that connects local devices, and it eventually stuck.
The technology was differentiated from Wi-Fi by being “inherently short range,” Harrison said. It’s still the case today that the Bluetooth options many consumers are accustomed to in their phones and portable speakers function at lower power and can only connect at limited distances.
Bluetooth signals travel over unlicensed airwaves, which are effectively open to the public for anyone to use, as opposed to privatized airwaves that are controlled by companies like AT&T or Verizon. This may have eased its development and broader adoption, but it came at a cost.
Bluetooth must share and compete with a slew of other products using unlicensed spectrum bands, such as baby monitors, TV remotes, and more. This may generate interference that can disrupt your Bluetooth’s effectiveness.
Harrison cites other reasons why Bluetooth can be “unusually painful,” including cybersecurity issues that can arise when transmitting data wirelessly.
If you set up a Bluetooth speaker in your New York apartment building, for example, you wouldn’t want just anyone within a 50-feet radius to be able to connect to it. But manufacturers never settled on a seamless “discovery mode” process, Harrison said.
“Sometimes the device will start up automatically and be in this, ‘I’m ready to pair mode,'” he added. “Sometimes you have to click some kind of alien sequence to get the device into this particular mode.”
More than that, multiple U.S. government agencies have advised consumers that using Bluetooth risks leaving their devices more vulnerable to cybersecurity risks. The Federal Communications Commission has warned that, as with Wi-Fi connections, “Bluetooth can put your personal data at risk if you are not careful.”
At least one high-profile government official is said to be a Bluetooth skeptic: Vice President Kamala Harris. In the much-watched video of Harris congratulating President-elect Joe Biden after the election (“We did it, Joe!“), she can be seen holding a clump of wired headphones in her hands. According to Politico, Harris “has long felt that Bluetooth headphones are a security risk.”
But businesses and consumers continue to embrace Bluetooth. Apple, perhaps most prominently, ditched traditional headphone ports and introduced its popular Bluetooth-enabled wireless earbuds, AirPods. Other tech companies have since rolled out similar products.
Some diehard audiophiles, the sort of people “who complain about Spotify not being high-quality enough,” as Harrison puts it, also refuse to embrace the world of Bluetooth headphones for sound quality reasons.
Despite its flaws, Harrison doesn’t see demand for Bluetooth dying down and admits he himself uses it seamlessly — some “70% of the time.”
“Bluetooth hasn’t seen its pinnacle yet,” Harrison said, predicting the widespread adoption of the Internet of Things, or smart devices, working together in close range will only add to its growth. “Bluetooth will be the glue that connects that all together.”
Coca-Cola has announced plans to release a Pride series NFT collection to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community.
Coca-Cola will be collaborating with artist and advocate Rich Mnisi.
The Pride Series NFT collection will be minted on the Polygon Network (MATIC).
The world-renowned beverage company of Coca-Cola has announced that it will be launching a Pride series NFT collection in celebration of the LGBTQIA+ community. Each NFT will be unique and ‘aims to shine color-filled light on the community’s members and spread a message of Love.Coca-Cola will be collaborating with designer and advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights, Rich Mnisi, who hails from South Africa. The team at Coca-Cola further pointed out that Rich Mnisi’s artwork ‘pushes boundaries on the concepts of identity and community.’ They explained:
136 NFTs on the Polygon Network (MATIC).
“Coca-Cola commissioned bespoke Mnisi artwork for this collection to be sliced into individual fragments and dispersed across all 136 collectibles, making each one unique. Our hope with the pieces is to increase visibility by radiating the full spectrum of the community’s colors and spreading a simple message of Love,” the firm said in an announcement last week.
Rich Mnisi and Coca-Cola will collaborate in the creation of 136 NFTs, which are currently being minted on the Polygon Network (eaMATIC). Some of the NFTs are already listed on OpenSea. The Coca-Cola Pride Series NFTs now have a floor price of 1 Ethereum.
In addition, Coca-Cola commissioned the art, hoping each NFT would ‘increase visibility by radiating the full spectrum of the community’s colors and spreading a simple message of Love.’
Furthermore, all proceeds of the initial sale of the NFTs will be donated to charities serving the LGBTQIA+ community. For the first 12 months, the proceeds will be donated directly to OUT, an LGBTQIA+ charity chosen by Rich Mnisi. The organization is the second-oldest in South Arica, professionally serving the LGBTQIA+ community with physical and mental healthcare.
Interestingly, all the funds generated from the initial sale of the 136 NFTs built on the Polygon (MATIC) network, an Ethereum scaling solution, will be donated to multiple charities supporting and fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights. Coca-Cola added that the first charity to benefit will be OUT, the second-oldest LGBT organization in South Africa, which was chosen by Mnisi.
“These free forms represent both love’s permanence and its changing state. They’re to remind us of the power that lies within all of us to choose what love will become. Love is what we make it. Choose to love freely,” Coca-Cola added.
