COVID vaccines and first boosters provided significant protection to pregnant women against severe complications and death, even after the arrival of the new Omicron variant, according to a study published this week in The Lancet medical journal.

This study "demonstrates a vaccine effectiveness in preventing severe complications of severe COVID-19 of 76% following vaccination and at least one booster," said Dr. Michael Gravett, an OB-GYN with the University of Washington School of Medicine who participated in the study, which was led by Oxford University. "Given the marked increased in maternal mortality and severe morbidity seen in our earlier studies prior to vaccination, the 76% efficacy is pretty impressive and really points to the need to get women vaccinated."

The main point of the study, which was completed before other variants came on the scene, is for pregnant women to get vaccinated and receive all their boosters, including the bivalent booster, he said.The bivalent booster contains components targeting the original strain of the virus as well as a component of the Omicron strain, which emerged in late 2021.

As of the first week of January, 71% of pregnant women have received their primary COVID vaccines but only 19% have received the recommended bivalent booster, according the the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In Washington state, only 29% of pregnant women have received the bivalent booster, Gravett said.

Gravett noted that the study, one of the largest of its kind, compared outcomes of 1,545 pregnant women diagnosed with COVID-19 with those of 3,073 pregnant women without the infection. UW Medicine sites were one of three in the United States included in the study. Gravett and Dr. Alisa Kachikis guided the Seattle part of the study, which included around 75 women from UW Medical Center-Montlake, UW Medical Center-Northwest and Harborview Medical Center.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230127/COVID-vaccines-and-first-boosters-provided-protection-to-pregnant-women-during-Omicron-surge.aspx

Sleep plays a critical role in mental health. And a new study led by University of Arizona researchers has found a link in sleep problems and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

The study surveyed 885 people from May 2020 to May 2021. Forty-one percent of participants had thought about suicide in their lifetime.

The team then compared individuals with and without suicide ideation on different measures of sleep, such as duration, timing, insomnia, nightmares and depressive symptoms.

Lead author Michael Grandner with UA said working to improve sleep health can reduce the risk of suicide.

Suicide was in the top three leading causes of death for those aged 10-35 in 2020.

The study was published in the Journal of American College Health.

https://kjzz.org/content/1837252/study-sleep-problems-linked-suicidal-thoughts

Senior women were less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment or dementia if they did more daily walking and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, according to a new study led by the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at University of California San Diego.

In the Jan. 25, 2023 online edition of Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, the team reported that, among women aged 65 or older, each additional 31 minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity was associated with a 21 percent lower risk of developing mild cognitive impairment or dementia. Risk was also 33 percent lower with each additional 1,865 daily steps.

“Given that the onset of dementia begins 20 years or more before symptoms show, the early intervention for delaying or preventing cognitive decline and dementia among older adults is essential,” said senior author Andrea LaCroix, Ph.D., M.P.H., Distinguished Professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at UC San Diego.

While there are several types, dementias are a debilitating neurological condition that can cause loss of memory, the ability to think, problem solve or reason. Mild cognitive impairment is an early stage of memory loss or thinking problems that is not as severe as dementias.

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12908

Rather than disposing of batteries after two or three years, we could have recyclable batteries that last for up to nine years, by using high-frequency sound waves to remove rust that inhibits battery performance, the team says.

Only 10% of used handheld batteries, including for mobile phones, are collected for recycling in Australia, which is low by international standards. The remaining 90% of batteries go to landfill or are disposed of incorrectly, which causes considerable damage to the environment.

The high cost of recycling lithium and other materials from batteries is a major barrier to these items being reused, but the team’s innovation could help to address this challenge.

The team are working with a nanomaterial called MXene, a class of materials they say promises to be an exciting alternative to lithium for batteries in the future.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34699-3

The early stages of the pandemic created a breeding ground for COVID-19 conspiracy theories, which, on Twitter, spread almost as fast as the virus itself. But out of the pandemic’s most prominent early conspiracies, which were shared the most and why?

To find out, a team of researchers, led by Itai Himelboim, the Thomas C. Dowden Professor of Media Analytics at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, collected nearly 400,000 tweets sent between Jan. 19, 2020, to June 30, 2020, about COVID-19 conspiracy theories surrounding Bill Gates, QAnon, the vaccine, 5G networks and Agenda 21. They then analyzed the content of the webpages shared in the tweets.

The overwhelming majority, roughly 87 percent, of webpages linked in tweets and retweets centered on the conspiracy theory surrounding Bill Gates, a villain-based conspiracy theory blaming Gates for creating the virus and financially benefiting from the pandemic. Following Gates, in order of most to least tweeted about, were QAnon, 5G networks, the vaccine and Agenda 21.

“Looking for who to blame for the pandemic was a major motivator in the early stages of the pandemic-related conspiracy theories, illustrated by the Bill Gates-related theory being the most popular,” Himelboim explained.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448221142800?journalCode=nmsa

Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.

The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects — arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here.

This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF's NOIRLab. CTIO is a constellation of international astronomical telescopes perched atop Cerro Tololo in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters (7200 feet). CTIO’s lofty vantage point gives astronomers an unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.11909