UT Arlington lab develops rapid flood maps to aid recovery and improve future flood warnings in Texas' Hill Country
In less than an hour on July 5, the H2i recreated a map of the Kerr County floods, using data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The maps show how high the water levels got at certain times during the morning of July Fourth.
University of Texas at Arlington professor Adnan Rajib oversees the team.
"These buildings, camp buildings, are underwater. This is 45 feet," said Rajib. "We actually didn't have a lot of idea how devastating the situation was, until we overlaid on Google Art with all these buildings and stuff, then we realized that this is going to be much more significant than what we knew at that particular time."
The maps also show the number of structures that were inside the FEMA 100-year flood zone.
"It was a tsunami," Rajib said. "In our estimate, we found at least 1,800 building footprints within Hill Country's flood-affected areas, that's a lot."
The team believes their findings can also help recovery crews and authorities locate people's remains by targeting hotspots in the area.
"Imagine you're a first responder, this is a warning that our model generated, where you go… you know that this is the pocket, this is the hot spot, so you'll go there first," he said. "By recreating how the flood changed over time, we can find out… we can look at those moving hot spots, and probably track how the flood eventually moved along the river."
Rajib said we need to focus not only on emergency alert systems, but also on a flood warning system that gives people real-time information of "risk" in a specific area.
Based on past flooding events in Hill Country, the team said they are not surprised by what happened on July Fourth, but said it's important to pay attention to the data and learn from the past.
"Let's not lose our hopes, let's rise again, and see what we can do with all the smart technologies we have," he said.
The H2i Lab hopes to share its findings with officials in Kerr County.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
9 minutes ago
- Yahoo
New Kind of Dental Floss Could Replace Vaccine Needles, Study Finds
A fear of needles is a common reason for avoiding vaccines, even among many adults. Now researchers have come up with a rather clever alternative: dental floss. Led by a team from Texas Tech University, the researchers first identified an often overlooked surface in the mouth as an entry point for vaccines: the junctional epithelium (JE), which sits where the gums meet the teeth. The JE is leaky by design, because it allows immune cells to move around and defend the oral cavity from bacterial attack. The researchers wondered whether this could also make this part of the mouth a suitable target for vaccines. "We hypothesized that this leakiness of the JE could expedite the entry of vaccine antigens, and the abundance of immune cells in this microenvironment could elicit an adaptive immune response," the researchers write in their recently published paper. Related: Delivering medications to the JE is complicated by the tissue's seclusion within the gumline, which is why it hasn't really been considered as a potential location for introducing vaccines. That's where floss comes in, which is perfect for getting into tight spaces. The researchers tested their hypothesis by coating dental floss with different types of vaccines and testing them on mice across a period of several weeks. There were numerous encouraging indicators: strong immune responses were observed in the mouth and throughout the bodies of the mice, and the floss vaccine was effective in protecting mice against a later flu infection. Further tests were conducted on human volunteers using dye rather than a vaccine, since clinical trials are still some way off. The amount of dye that reached the JE target via flossing was enough to suggest that this really could work in us too. "These findings establish floss-based vaccination as a simple, needle-free strategy that enhances vaccine delivery and immune activation compared with existing mucosal immunization methods," write the researchers. It's not the first time scientists have looked beyond the thorough cleaning job that floss does. Earlier this year research showed that floss could also be adapted to measure stress levels in the body, potentially giving doctors another useful diagnostic tool. As well as being potentially less scary for those with a phobia of needles, floss-based vaccines would be easier to transport and store. Doctors and nurses wouldn't be needed to administer them, and they could even be delivered in the post – a real advantage in the case of pandemics such as COVID-19. Researchers have previously tried to deliver vaccines orally under the tongue and in the cheek, but not enough of the vaccine penetrates the tissue into circulation. While there's still a lot of work to do with this new approach, the potential is clear. "Due to drawbacks associated with injectable vaccines, such as pain and needle phobia, potential transmission of blood-borne pathogens from unsafe injection practices and the limited activation of mucosal immunity, there is a need for alternative approaches for vaccine delivery," write the researchers. The research has been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Related News World's Most Common Pain Relief Drug May Induce Risky Behavior, Research Suggests Human Brains Rapidly Aged in The Pandemic, And It Wasn't Just The Virus Eating Eggs Can Actually Lower Bad Cholesterol, New Study Says Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
2 hours ago
- Fox News
Could dental floss be the next vaccine method? Scientists say it could work
Dental floss could eventually do much more than improve oral hygiene. A new study led by Texas Tech University and the University of North Carolina suggests that the thin filament could eventually double as a vaccine mechanism. In animal models, the researchers showed that dental floss can effectively release vaccines through the tissue between the teeth and gums, according to a press release. In the study, the flossing technique triggered the production of antibodies in "mucosal surfaces," such as the lining of the nose and lungs, the release stated. The findings were published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. "Mucosal surfaces are important, because they are a source of entry for pathogens, such as influenza and COVID," said co-author Harvinder Singh Gill, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University, in the release. With the traditional method of injecting vaccines, the antibodies are primarily produced in the bloodstream, he noted. "But we know that when a vaccine is given via the mucosal surface, antibodies are stimulated not only in the bloodstream, but also on mucosal surfaces," said Gill. "This improves the body's ability to prevent infection, because there is an additional line of antibody defense before a pathogen enters the body." The vaccine enters through the "junctional epithelium," which is a thin layer of tissue in the deep pocket between the tooth and the gum. This tissue doesn't have the same barrier as other tissue linings, which means it can release immune cells into the body. In the study, the researchers added a peptide flu vaccine to unwaxed dental floss before flossing the teeth of lab mice, according to the release. Next, they compared the effectiveness of the floss-delivered vaccine to techniques that delivered it nasally or orally. "It would be easy to administer, and it addresses concerns many people have about being vaccinated with needles." "We found that applying vaccine via the junctional epithelium produces a far superior antibody response on mucosal surfaces than the current gold standard for vaccinating via the oral cavity, which involves placing vaccine under the tongue," said first author Rohan Ingrole, a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University. "The flossing technique also provides comparable protection against the flu virus as compared to the vaccine being given via the nasal epithelium." In addition to flu, the test was repeated for three other vaccine types: proteins, inactivated viruses and mRNA. For all types, the flossing technique produced "robust antibody responses in the bloodstream and across mucosal surfaces," the release stated. Next, the research team aims to test the effectiveness of vaccine delivery to the epithelial junction in humans through the use of floss picks, which are easier to hold. "It would be easy to administer, and it addresses concerns many people have about being vaccinated with needles," Gill said. "And we think this technique should be comparable in price to other vaccine delivery techniques." Hua Wang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois' Grainger College of Engineering, was not involved in the study but shared his reaction to the findings. "This study presents a promising floss-based vaccination method that can avoid needle injection or any potentially painful procedure," he told Fox News Digital. "The authors demonstrated that vaccine components in the floss coating can penetrate the junctional epithelium in gingival sulcus and reach the underlying tissues, leading to systemic antibody responses." The floss-based vaccination method could help to improve patient compliance if it goes through the full evaluation process, he noted. There are some limitations and drawbacks associated with floss-based vaccines, the researchers acknowledged. Babies and toddlers who don't have teeth yet wouldn't be candidates for the technique, for example. "In addition, we would need to know more about how or whether this approach would work for people who have gum disease or other oral infections," Gill added. Wang agreed that many questions remain to be answered about this experimental vaccination method. "In addition to the unclear impact of gingival tissue infection on vaccination, the local and systemic side effects of this vaccination method remain to be understood," he told Fox News Digital. "For example, vaccination at the gingival tissue may initiate local inflammation that eventually induces undesirable side effects." It's also not yet clear what exact path the vaccine components follow when traveling from the tooth site to the tissues or how the immune responses are generated, Wang noted. For more Health articles, visit "Lastly, from the translation perspective, the efficacy of floss-based vaccines would need to be comparable to conventional needle-based vaccines." The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and by funds from the Whitacre Endowed Chair in Science and Engineering at Texas Tech University.
Boston Globe
19 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Three out of five liver cancer cases are preventable, study finds
Advertisement The findings align with what liver specialists have seen in their clinics for years. 'Liver cancer is common, it causes immense suffering and death, and the saddest part for me as a physician is that most of the cases are preventable,' said Dr. Brian P. Lee, an associate professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study. Improved screening, vaccination and treatment in recent years have helped stem viral hepatitis, especially in the United States. But the threat of liver cancer from heavy alcohol use and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, or MASLD, formerly known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, 'has been underrecognized and underestimated,' said Dr. Ahmed Kaseb, a professor of gastrointestinal medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not associated with the study. Advertisement A 'highway' to liver cancer A vast majority of liver cancers arise in people with cirrhosis, said Dr. Hashem El-Serag, the chair of the department of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and one of the authors of the new study. Cirrhosis, or advanced and largely irreversible scarring of the liver, damages healthy tissue and prevents the organ from working normally. The hepatitis B and C viruses cause inflammation that, if left untreated, can scar and damage the liver, potentially leading to cirrhosis. And both alcohol and metabolic dysfunction lead to abnormal deposits of fat in the liver, which can also result in inflammation. Related : Lee said the accumulation of fat and inflammation acted as a 'highway' to liver scarring, which in turn can injure DNA and lead to cancer. 'There could be multiple ramps to get onto that highway,' he said. Why disease may go undetected The new paper found that the share of liver cancers resulting from hepatitis B and hepatitis C is expected to drop to 63% in 2050, from 68% in 2022. But the burden of liver cancers resulting from alcohol and MASLD is expected to grow. An estimated 4 in 10 adults worldwide have MASLD, a condition in which fat builds up in the liver. Risk factors include obesity and Type 2 diabetes. A subset of patients with MASLD will go on to develop an advanced form called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, or MASH, which has been described as a silent killer because it can progress to cirrhosis and liver cancer without being noticed. Current guidance recommends monitoring for liver cancers in patients who have a history of viral hepatitis or established cirrhosis. Patients with MASH typically don't meet that criteria, Kaseb said, but they could have liver scarring without symptoms, and nobody would know. Related : Advertisement That's why screening for liver disease needs to begin at the primary care level, where cases can easily go undetected, said Dr. Mary Rinella, a hepatologist at University of Chicago Medicine and the lead author of guidelines for the management of MASLD. She recommended that doctors use a metric called the Fib-4, which uses routine blood test results to estimate the amount of liver scarring, to screen high-risk patients. These include people who have Type 2 diabetes or obesity with at least one other metabolic risk factor, such as high cholesterol. MASLD is reversible with lifestyle changes, including a healthy diet and increased exercise, and weight-loss drugs have recently been shown to be effective at reversing scarring as well. 'If you stop the reason or the impetus for scarring and injury in the liver, then you're going to have less impetus for the development of cancer,' Rinella said. Alcohol compounds the problem Alcohol-related liver disease is also on the rise. In research published this month, Lee and his colleagues showed that the risk of alcohol-related liver disease among heavy drinkers (at least 10 drinks per week for women and 15 for men) in the United States more than doubled between 1999 and 2020, despite similar alcohol use over that period. That suggests that heavy drinkers today may be more sensitive to the effects of alcohol on the liver than those in the past, Lee said. This may be because the population of heavy drinkers is changing. The researchers found that women, who are more prone than men to develop fat and damage in the liver from alcohol, now make up a greater share of heavy drinkers than they did 20 years ago. So do people with metabolic syndrome, a cluster of metabolic disorders that together raise the risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke — and compound the damage done by alcohol to the liver. Related : Advertisement Drinking heavily and having a metabolic condition such as obesity can independently damage the liver, but patients who fall in both categories are at an especially high risk. These trends are likely to continue. 'Alcohol use is increasing,' Rinella said. 'Obesity and diabetes are increasing.' 'I expect that we're going to continue to see a high burden of liver disease,' she added. This article originally appeared in .
