Latest news with #bioRxiv
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Bird Flu Vaccine for Cows Passes Early Test
As bird flu sweeps across US poultry and cattle farms, researchers are racing to find ways to contain the outbreaks before they ignite a human pandemic. Now, a team of scientists has developed a fresh approach: the first mRNA bird-flu vaccine for cattle. Early findings, posted this month on the preprint server bioRxiv, reveal that the experimental vaccine triggers a strong immune response to the virus, and protects against infection in calves. The results have not yet been peer-reviewed. This development could mark a crucial step towards creating flu vaccines for livestock and reducing the risk of animal-to-human transmission of a virus that poses a 'real pandemic threat', says Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a co-author of the work. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Fears of a bird-flu pandemic have been rising since the first confirmed outbreak of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in dairy cattle was reported in March 2024. Since then, the virus has affected more than 1,000 dairy herds across 17 US states. Health officials have linked 64 human infections and one death to the outbreak. To create a cattle vaccine, Hensley and his team built on more than a decade of work on seasonal bird-flu mRNA vaccines. The researchers took one such vaccine candidate and swapped out its viral haemagglutinin gene — which encodes a protein known to elicit an immune response — with the corresponding gene from the new H5N1 virus found on dairy farms. 'It's so easy to switch,' says Hensley. 'That's really the value of using mRNA-based vaccines.' Last year, Hensley's team showed that their vaccine protects against avian flu in ferrets, a commonly used laboratory model for testing flu vaccines. For the latest work, they inoculated 10 calves and, 49 days later, fed them milk from H5N1-infected cows — a suspected route of transmission among cattle. After that exposure, the vaccinated calves had significantly lower levels of viral RNA than the unvaccinated calves did, indicating that the vaccine helped to curb infection. The study tested only vaccine responses in calves; much of the avian-flu transmission on dairy farms occurs among lactating adult cattle, says virologist Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds in Memphis, Tennessee. Hensley's team is already working on extra trials in lactating cows. Even without that data, the current results are a strong first step towards developing a vaccine: 'It's good news,' Webby says. Other livestock vaccines could be on the way. The US Department of Agriculture has approved at least seven candidates for field trials this year. In mid-February, the agency also conditionally approved a bird flu vaccine for chickens. But political headwinds against mRNA vaccines could threaten Hensley's effort. Republican lawmakers in South Carolina, Texas and Montana have introduced bills to ban mRNA vaccines in livestock, arguing that they pose risks to human health. And some scientists worry that vaccine scepticism in US President Donald Trump's administration will lead to cuts in funding for mRNA-vaccine development. 'I'm optimistic that they will continue to support the development of these vaccines,' Hensley says. 'It would be a crime right now to stop it.' Other scientists question whether vaccines for cattle will be economically viable for farmers. That will depend on how many doses are needed and its price, says microbiologist Shollie Falkenberg at Auburn University in Alabama. 'The livestock industry is in the business of making money,' she says. 'At the end of the day, people want to see the economics behind it.' Still, vaccinating cattle might soon become necessary to prevent further infections, potential deaths and mounting economic losses, says Webby. 'I don't think that cattle vaccines on their own are sort of a silver bullet,' he says. 'But we have to do something different because what we're doing now is clearly not working.' This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on May 21, 2025.
Scientific American
22-05-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Bird Flu Vaccine for Cows Passes Early Test
As bird flu sweeps across US poultry and cattle farms, researchers are racing to find ways to contain the outbreaks before they ignite a human pandemic. Now, a team of scientists has developed a fresh approach: the first mRNA bird-flu vaccine for cattle. Early findings, posted this month on the preprint server bioRxiv, reveal that the experimental vaccine triggers a strong immune response to the virus, and protects against infection in calves. The results have not yet been peer-reviewed. This development could mark a crucial step towards creating flu vaccines for livestock and reducing the risk of animal-to-human transmission of a virus that poses a 'real pandemic threat', says Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a co-author of the work. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Fears of a bird-flu pandemic have been rising since the first confirmed outbreak of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in dairy cattle was reported in March 2024. Since then, the virus has affected more than 1,000 dairy herds across 17 US states. Health officials have linked 64 human infections and one death to the outbreak. A fresh approach To create a cattle vaccine, Hensley and his team built on more than a decade of work on seasonal bird-flu mRNA vaccines. The researchers took one such vaccine candidate and swapped out its viral haemagglutinin gene — which encodes a protein known to elicit an immune response — with the corresponding gene from the new H5N1 virus found on dairy farms. 'It's so easy to switch,' says Hensley. 'That's really the value of using mRNA-based vaccines.' Last year, Hensley's team showed that their vaccine protects against avian flu in ferrets, a commonly used laboratory model for testing flu vaccines. For the latest work, they inoculated 10 calves and, 49 days later, fed them milk from H5N1-infected cows — a suspected route of transmission among cattle. After that exposure, the vaccinated calves had significantly lower levels of viral RNA than the unvaccinated calves did, indicating that the vaccine helped to curb infection. The study tested only vaccine responses in calves; much of the avian-flu transmission on dairy farms occurs among lactating adult cattle, says virologist Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds in Memphis, Tennessee. Hensley's team is already working on extra trials in lactating cows. Even without that data, the current results are a strong first step towards developing a vaccine: 'It's good news,' Webby says. Uncertain future Other livestock vaccines could be on the way. The US Department of Agriculture has approved at least seven candidates for field trials this year. In mid-February, the agency also conditionally approved a bird flu vaccine for chickens. But political headwinds against mRNA vaccines could threaten Hensley's effort. Republican lawmakers in South Carolina, Texas and Montana have introduced bills to ban mRNA vaccines in livestock, arguing that they pose risks to human health. And some scientists worry that vaccine scepticism in US President Donald Trump's administration will lead to cuts in funding for mRNA-vaccine development. 'I'm optimistic that they will continue to support the development of these vaccines,' Hensley says. 'It would be a crime right now to stop it.' Other scientists question whether vaccines for cattle will be economically viable for farmers. That will depend on how many doses are needed and its price, says microbiologist Shollie Falkenberg at Auburn University in Alabama. 'The livestock industry is in the business of making money,' she says. 'At the end of the day, people want to see the economics behind it.' Still, vaccinating cattle might soon become necessary to prevent further infections, potential deaths and mounting economic losses, says Webby. 'I don't think that cattle vaccines on their own are sort of a silver bullet,' he says. 'But we have to do something different because what we're doing now is clearly not working.'
CBC
09-05-2025
- Science
- CBC
Using microbes to solve crimes, and more…
The beginnings of our end — where the anus came from Our distant evolutionary ancestors had no anuses. Their waste was excreted from the same orifice they used to ingest food, much like jellyfish do today. Now a new study on bioRxiv that has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists think they've found the evolutionary link in a worm with only a single digestive hole. Andreas Hejnol, from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, said he found genes we now associate with the anus being expressed in the worms in the opening where its sperm comes out, suggesting that in our evolutionary history a similar orifice was co-opted as a butt hole. Deepfake videos are becoming so real, spotting them is becoming increasingly diceyDetecting deepfake videos generated by artificial intelligence is a problem that's getting progressively worse as the technology continues to improve. One way we used to be able to tell the difference between a fake and real video is that subtle signals revealing a person's heart rate don't exist in artificially generated videos. But that is no longer the case, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Imaging. Peter Eisert, from Humboldt University and the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute HHI in Germany, said detecting manipulated content visually is only going to become a lot more difficult going forward. Crows can use tools, do math — and now apparently understand geometryCrows are known to be among the most intelligent of animals, and a new study has explored their geometrical sophistication. Researchers including Andreas Nieder from the University of Tübingen found that crows can recognize and distinguish different kinds of quadrilateral shapes, an ability we had thought was unique to humans. The research was published in the journal Science Advances. There's gold in them thar magnetically charged neutron stars!Astronomers have discovered a new source of the universe's heavy elements — things like gold, platinum and uranium. A study led by astrophysicist Anirudh Patel found that magnetars — exotic neutron stars with ultra-powerful magnetic fields — may produce these elements in a process analogous to the way solar flares are produced by our Sun. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that a single flare from a magnetar could produce the mass equivalent of 27 moons' worth of these heavy elements in one burst. It may not be big, but it's small — and stroppyYou might not expect an insect so tiny you need a magnifying glass to see it properly to be an aggressive defender of its territory, but that's because you haven't met the warty birch caterpillar. Its territory is just the tip of a birch leaf, but it defends it by threatening intruders with vigorous, if not precisely powerful, vibrations. Jayne Yack at Carleton University has been studying this caterpillar since 2008. This research was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Criminals beware — the microbiome leaves fingerprintsScientists have developed a new tool that can track location based on traces of the bacteria characteristic to different places. Eran Elhaik, from Lund University in Sweden, trained the AI tool using nearly 4,500 microbiome samples collected around the world from subway systems, soil and the oceans. He said they could identify the city source in 92 per cent of their urban samples, and in Hong Kong, where a lot of their data came from, they could identify the specific subway station samples were taken from with 82 per cent accuracy. The study was published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
Richard Sever
When Richard Sever co-founded a medical research preprint site—where scientists can share early versions of their research with the public for free—called medRxiv in 2019, he couldn't have foreseen what was coming. By March 2020, the site was getting hundreds of new research paper submissions every week—first from China, then Italy, then the UK and US, mirroring the spread of COVID-19 cases around the world. Sever and his team were working 14-hour days, 7 days a week to screen each paper to verify the science, catch plagiarism, protect patient privacy, and eliminate misinformation. In those days, medRxiv and bioRxiv, a biology research preprint server Sever co-founded in 2013, hosted 25% of all COVID-19 research. To date, bioRxiv and medRxiv have published more preprints than any other biology server. 'We saw these bizarre scenarios where a paper would come out about a new variant of COVID on bioRxiv and medRxiv and you knew how important it was in real time,' says Sever. Had that paper appeared in a journal several months later after peer review, he noted, the findings would no longer have been relevant. One trial that found dexamethasone effective for treating severe COVID went on medRxiv for many weeks before it was in a journal. 'The day it went up, you could see the data, people could read it, physicians around the world could put that into practice,' Sever says. The chaos during COVID-19 proved the importance of sites like medRxiv and bioRxiv in communicating research in an increasingly digital world, and challenged a decades-old publishing and peer review process to modernize. In 2024, the two preprint platforms, which had been embedded within the infrastructure of the well-respected Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since their inception, announced that they would be breaking out to stand on their own, overseen by an independent non-profit organization, openRxiv. Sever serves as openRxiv's chief science and strategy officer, and works to make the platform an accessible and open place for researchers of all backgrounds to share good science.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Human Lifespans Keep Increasing—and Scientists Say They're Not Slowing Down Anytime Soon
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Researchers are now suggesting that male and female lifespans continue to increase linearly, and have not yet hit a hard limit. Previous studies argued that human life expectancy is increasing by less and less each year, but that is only because it was studied in the wealthiest countries. Immortality may still be a reach, but advances in medicine and public welfare mean countries with lower average lifespans are catching up to those that are longer-lived. From iconic songs by Queen and Alphaville to Isaac Asimov's radical sci-fi vision of the essence of life eternally encoded into computers, immortality has been a human desire that has persisted since the first deathless gods emerged thousands and thousands of years ago. Could we really live forever if there was no physical or biological force to strike us down? The omnipresence of that questions explains why humans have a history of trying anything to defy the finality of death. Ancient Egyptians mummified their dead because of the belief that the deceased would need their bodies in the endless fertile fields and gilded palaces of the afterlife. Adaptogen beverages brewed from mushrooms have become the newest New-Age immortality tonic. Walt Disney had himself cryogenically frozen (well, this one may be a stretch). But so far nothing has worked, and according to many experts, nothing ever will. Several studies have hypothesized a hard limit to the human lifespan. But recently, researchers Lucio Vincius and Andrea Migliano from the University of Zurich have argued against that—they do not see the lifespan of our species plateauing just yet. While there has yet to be evidence of any human being making it past the age of 122 (a record still held by French supercentenarian Jeanne Calment), Vincius and Migliano have set out to disprove the claim of a hard limit on human life expectancy suggested in a 2024 study led by epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois. Olshansky acknowledges that advances in medicine and public health have steadily increased the human life expectancy over time, but at least in the world's wealthiest (and longest-lived) nations, increases have slowed down drastically in the past 30 years. What these findings don't take into account, however, is the rest of the global population. 'Both female and male lifespans continue to linearly increase at a global scale,' Vinicius and Migliano said their study, which is in the process of being peer-reviewed and has been uploaded as a preprint to the server bioRxiv. 'This remarkably long trend observed since 1840 remains at odds with our expectation that human lifespans must at some point hit a biologically imposed ceiling.' Even with life expectancy rising by fewer years per decade, the researchers have found nothing in the data that conclusively proves the trend has hit a ceiling. In fact, they caution that previous claims of such a ceiling are only premature predictions. Now, Olshansky and his colleagues are doubtful that any more than 15% of females and 5% of males will reach their hundredth birthday, and stated 'radical human life extension is implausible.' However, these findings are limited to ten countries in which the rise in life expectancy has slowed down, presumably with an end in sight. (This is also not a new assumption—humanity was thought to have approached its upper limit to life expectancy as far back as 1990.) Referring to the Human Mortality Database—whose longevity data covers 41 countries—what Vinicius and Migliano see is a continuation in the improvement of life expectancy on a global scale. Male lifespans have increased by an average of 2.03 years per decade since 1840, and female lifespans increased by 2.31 years per decade in that same time frame. Between 2000 and 2020, male lifespans have increased by 1.96 years per decade for males and 1.45 years per decade for females, neither of which is that far off from previous decades. Men are catching up to women, and countries with lower life expectancies are catching up to those with higher life expectancies. Whether lifespans in those countries will reach (or even exceed) what was studied by Olshansky remains unknown. If there is a longevity ceiling, nobody has hit it yet. So, as far as we know, we are living longer and longer. Figuring out just how long we could live could take centuries, millennia or just a few decades. There is a proposed limit, but even that is hypothetical. The end is not (yet) in sight. You Might Also Like
