Science
A six-planet solar system in perfect synchrony has been found in the Milky Way
Astronomers have discovered a rare in-sync solar system with six planets moving like a grand cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since their birth billions of years ago.
North Korea will try again to launch a military spy satellite in the coming days
The find, announced Wednesday, can help explain how solar systems across the Milky Way galaxy came to be. This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
A pair of planet-hunting satellites — NASA’s Tess and the European Space Agency’s Cheops — teamed up for the observations.
None of the planets in perfect synchrony are within the star’s so-called habitable zone, which means little if any likelihood of life, at least as we know it.
“Here we have a golden target” for comparison, said Adrien Leleu of the University of Geneva, who was part of an international team that published the results in the journal Nature.
This star, known as HD 110067, may have even more planets. The six found so far are roughly two to three times the size of Earth, but with densities closer to the gas giants in our own solar system. Their orbits range from nine to 54 days, putting them closer to their star than Venus is to the sun and making them exceedingly hot.
As gas planets, they're believed to have solid cores made of rock, metal or ice, enveloped by thick layers of hydrogen, according to the scientists. More observations are needed to determine what's in their atmospheres.
This solar system is unique because all six planets move similar to a perfectly synchronized symphony, scientists said. In technical terms, it’s known as resonance that's “precise, very orderly,” said co-author Enric Palle of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.
The innermost planet completes three orbits for every two by its closest neighbor. It's the same for the second- and third-closest planets, and the third- and fourth-closest planets.
The two outermost planets complete an orbit in 41 and 54.7 days, resulting in four orbits for every three. The innermost planet, meanwhile, completes six orbits in exactly the time the outermost completes one.
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All solar systems, including our own, are thought to have started out like this one, according to the scientists. But it's estimated only 1-in-100 systems have retained that synchrony, and ours isn't one of them. Giant planets can throw things off-kilter. So can meteor bombardments, close encounters with neighboring stars and other disturbances.
While astronomers know of 40 to 50 in-sync solar systems, none have as many planets in such perfect step or as bright a star as this one, Palle said.
The University of Bern’s Hugh Osborn, who was part of the team, was “shocked and delighted” when the orbital periods of this star system’s planets came close to what scientists predicted.
“My jaw was on the floor,” he said. “That was a really nice moment.”
North Korea will try again to launch a military spy satellite in the coming days
North Korea told Japan on Tuesday that it will make a third attempt to launch a military spy satellite in the coming days, prompting its neighbors to issue an urgent request for the North not to perform the launch in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Japan’s coast guard said North Korea notified Tokyo of its plan to launch the satellite sometime between Wednesday and Nov. 30.
The notice identified three maritime zones where debris from the rocket carrying the satellite may fall. Two are in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and China and the third in the Philippine Sea, Japanese coast guard spokesperson Kazuo Ogawa said.
Ogawa said the areas are the same as North Korea identified for its failed satellite launches in May and August, implying the third attempt would have a similar flight path. North Korea has given Japan the launch information because Japan’s coast guard coordinates and distributes maritime safety information in East Asia.
The North’s notification came a day after rival South Korea warned it to cancel its launch or face consequences. South Korea’s military suggested Seoul would suspend a 2018 inter-Korean agreement to reduce tensions and resume front-line aerial surveillance and live-firing drills in response to a North Korean satellite launch.
U.N. Security Council resolutions ban any satellite launches by North Korea because they are seen as a cover for testing its missile technology. North Korea says it needs a space-based surveillance system to better monitor its rivals, but South Korea says the North’s launches are also designed to enhance its long-range missile program.
Read: NASA telescopes discover record-breaking black hole
Since last year, North Korea has carried out about 100 missile tests as part of its efforts to modernize its arsenal of nuclear-capable weapons targeting the United States and its allies. Many foreign experts say the North still has the few remaining technological hurdles to possess functioning nuclear-tipped missiles.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida asked officials to coordinate with other countries to ask North Korea to cancel its launch. He said Japanese destroyers carrying Aegis-class radars and PAC-3 missile defense systems on Okinawa have been activated to stand by in case of an unexpected development.
“Even if the purpose is to launch a satellite, if ballistic missile technology is used, it is a violation of the United Nations Security Council resolutions, and this is a matter that greatly affects the safety of the people,” Kishida said.
During trilateral phone talks, senior officials from Japan, South Korea and the U.S. affirmed their cooperation to “strongly request North Korea to cancel” its launch plan, according to Japan’s Foreign Ministry. South Korea’s Unification Ministry said separately that it strongly urged North Korea to scrap the launch plan because it would pose a serious threat to regional peace.
After the second launch failure, North Korea had vowed a third launch would take place in October, but failed to follow through with the plan without giving any reason. South Korean officials recently said the delay happened likely because North Korea is receiving Russian technology assistance.
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North Korea and Russia are pushing to expand their relationships in the face of separate confrontations with the West — North Korea over its nuclear ambitions and Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Foreign governments and experts say North Korea is seeking Russian technologies to enhance its nuclear and other military capabilities in return for supplying conventional arms to support Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine. Such transfer would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban any weapons trading to and from North Korea.
“I will just say that our position is very clear, which is that Russia should not supply North Korea with technology that would violate United Nations Security Council resolutions,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday. “North Korea should not supply Russia with arms that it can use to prosecute its war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Both Russia and North Korea dismissed the alleged weapon transfer deal as baseless. But when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un travelled to Russia in September, President Vladimir Putin told state media that his country would help North Korea build satellites.
In the first launch attempt, the North Korean rocket carrying the satellite plunged into the ocean soon after liftoff. North Korean authorities said the rocket lost thrust after the separation of its first and second stages. After the second launch failure, North Korea said there was an error in the emergency blasting system during the third-stage flight.
South Korea retrieved debris from the first launch and said the satellite wasn’t advanced enough to perform military reconnaissance. But some civilian experts said the North Korean satellite was still likely capable of detecting big targets like warships so it could be militarily useful for the North.
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North Korea is under rounds of punishing U.N. sanctions imposed over its past weapons tests and rocket launches. But its recent testing activities and two spy satellite launches didn’t earn the North fresh sanctions, because Russia and China blocked the U.S. and others’ attempts to toughen the sanctions.
South Korea and the U.S. have been expanding their military exercises and increasing the temporary deployments of U.S. strategic assets in South Korea in an effort to cope with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal.
On Tuesday, the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and its battle group arrived at a South Korean port in a show of the allies’ firm readiness against North Korea’s evolving nuclear threats, South Korea’s navy said.
Earlier this year, the U.S. flew nuclear-capable bombers and deployed a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea as well.
Progress in childhood cancer has stalled for Blacks and Hispanics, report says
Advances in childhood cancer are a success story in modern medicine. But in the past decade, those strides have stalled for Black and Hispanic youth, opening a gap in death rates, according to a new report published Thursday.
Childhood cancers are rare and treatments have improved drastically in recent decades, saving lives.
Death rates were about the same for Black, Hispanic and white children in 2001, and all went lower during the next decade. But over the next 10 years, only the rate for white children dipped a little lower.
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“You can have the most sophisticated scientific advances, but if we can’t deliver them into every community in the same way, then we have not met our goal as a nation,” said Dr. Sharon Castellino, a pediatric cancer specialist at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, who had no role in the new report.
She said the complexity of new cancers treatments such as gene therapy, which can cure some children with leukemia, can burden families and be an impediment to getting care.
“You need at least one parent to quit their job and be there 24/7, and then figure out the situation for the rest of their children," Castellino said. "It’s not that families don’t want to do that. It's difficult.”
More social workers are needed to help families file paperwork to get job-protected leave and make sure the child's health insurance is current and doesn't lapse.
The overall cancer death rate for children and teenagers in the U.S. declined 24% over the two decades, from 2.75 to 2.10 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
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The 2021 rate per 10,000 was 2.38 for Black youth, 2.36 for Hispanics and 1.99 for whites.
Nearly incurable 50 years ago, childhood cancer now is survivable for most patients, especially those with leukemia. The leading cause of cancer deaths in kids is now brain cancer, replacing leukemia.
Each year in the U.S. about 15,000 children and teens are diagnosed with cancer. More than 85% live for at least five years.
The improved survival stems from research collaboration among more than 200 hospitals, said Dr. Paula Aristizabal of the University of California, San Diego. At Rady Children’s Hospital, She is trying to include more Hispanic children, who are underrepresented in research.
“Equity means that we provide support that is tailored to each family,” Aristizabal said.
The National Cancer Institute is working to gather data from every childhood cancer patient with the goal of linking each child to state-of-the-art care. The effort could improve equity, said Dr. Emily Tonorezos, who leads the institute's work on cancer survivorship.
The CDC's report is “upsetting and discouraging,” she said. “It gives us a roadmap for where we need to go next.”
NASA telescopes discover record-breaking black hole
Astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays, using NASA telescopes, the agency said on Monday.
The black hole is at an early stage of growth that had never been witnessed before, where its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy.
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By combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers was able to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole just 470 million years after the big bang.
This result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed, said NASA.
The team found the black hole in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.
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Webb data, however, has revealed the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age, according to NASA.
Dutch conservation scientist Agnes Brokerhof receives ICCROM Award 2023
Agnes Brokerhof, a Dutch conservation scientist was announced the winner of this year’s ICCROM Award.
It was announced on Thursday on the sidelines of the 33rd session of the ICCROM General Assembly, held 2-3 November in Italy’s Rome, reads a media release.
This biennial Award is one of the most prestigious international recognitions in the field of cultural heritage. It is granted to individuals who have contributed significantly to ICCROM’s development or who have exceptional merit in the conservation, protection and restoration of cultural heritage.
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Agnes Brokerhof, a Dutch conservation scientist and scholar, holds a BSc in biochemistry, a MSc in Analytical Chemistry, and a BA in art history. Following her research fellowship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), she completed the ICCROM course “Scientific Principles of Conservation” in Rome and currently works for the Cultural Heritage Laboratory of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.
Ms. Brokerhof has dedicated her career to the conservation and management of all forms of cultural heritage. The importance of her work has been recognized worldwide, as she has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events, sharing her knowledge and skills through lectures and inspiring others in the field, in addition to her teaching, publications, and research papers.
“I am always amazed by the number of projects ICCROM carries out all over the world and the lasting impact they have, with a relatively small team in Rome. It is thanks to the ‘ICCROMized’ professionals they carefully select and tie together into a powerful network. I am proud to be a knot in that network and contribute my bit,” said Ms. Brokerhof upon receiving the award.
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Ms. Brokerhof’s contributions to conservation theory, science, and practice have spanned a great diversity of heritage, from built heritage and natural sciences and humanities collections to contemporary art. The emphasis of her work lies in finding practical and cost-effective solutions for real-life problems in heritage conservation and management, developing new knowledge and methods to support heritage institutions in doing their work more effectively and efficiently.
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Bangladeshi marine biologist Alifa Bintha Haque wins WINGS Women of Discovery Award
Dr Alifa Bintha Haque from Bangladesh has received WINGS Women of Discovery Award 2023. As part of the award, she is receiving unrestricted grants to further her critical work.
The award ceremony was held on October 12 in New York City, according to a press release.
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Alifa is a board member of WildTeam and an assistant professor of zoology at Dhaka University.
“I was very humbled to receive this award – woman of discovery, the 100th flag carrier. I was very fortunate to have been named in the cohort with the chief scientist of ESRI, Dawn Wright, and author of the 1st hotspot paper Cristina Mittermeier. It was such an honor!” – Alifa said.
Bangladesh focuses on conservation, sustainable use of marine biodiversity
Alifa’s work focuses on conserving sharks and rays in the global south context. She earned her PhD from the Nature-based Solutions Initiative in the Department of Biology, Oxford, with the support of a Bangabandhu Scholarship. Her research, “Towards a socially just sustainable fishery preserving sharks and rays in the Bay of Bengal,” aims to prepare a sustainability model for the threatened species of sharks and rays in close conjunction with the fishing communities.
Alifa and her team have established the largest regional dataset on diversity, fisheries and trade, discovering highly threatened species of sharks and rays, including 15 new records.
An Edge of Existence Fellow and National Geographic Explorer, Alifa was selected for the 2023 cohort of the Edinburgh Ocean Leaders Programme and awarded the best student presentation at Sharks International 2022 for her talk, “Can fishers be the conservation heroes we need them to be?”
Read more: Dhaka signs treaty of high seas for sustainable use of marine resources
14-year-old wins award for developing soap to treat skin cancer
A 14-year-old school student has been termed "America's top young scientist" for creating a bar of soap that may be effective in the treatment of melanoma, a skin cancer that affects roughly 100,000 individuals in the United States each year and kills approximately 8,000.
Heman Bekele, a ninth-grader from Annandale, Virginia, was selected over nine other finalists for the award, reports The Guardian.
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“Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time,” he said in his submission. “I have always been interested in biology and technology, and this challenge gave me the perfect platform to showcase my ideas,” he added.
He submitted his soap idea, "skin cancer treating soap," produced from ingredients that may reawaken dendritic cells that defend human skin, allowing them to combat cancer cells. Bekele stated in a video for the 3M Young Scientist Challenge that he believes "that young minds can make a positive impact on the world," the report said.
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Bekele's inspiration stemmed from his childhood in Ethiopia, where he saw people continually labouring under the blazing sun. “I wanted to make my idea something that not only was great in terms of science but also could be accessible to as many people as possible.”
Skin cancer is quite common, according to the American Cancer Society, with melanoma accounting for only 1 percent, yet causing the bulk of skin cancer deaths, the report also said.
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According to the association, melanoma rates have been significantly increasing over the last few decades, particularly among women over 50, and it is more than 20 times more prevalent in white people than in black people. At the same time, owing to breakthroughs in therapy, melanoma death rates have decreased over the last decade.
After receiving the award, Bekele told the judging panel that he hoped the soap would become a "symbol of hope, accessibility, and a world where skin cancer treatment is within everyone's reach."
How are ancient Roman and Mayan buildings still standing? Scientists are unlocking their secrets
In the quest to build better for the future, some are looking for answers in the long-ago past.
Ancient builders across the world created structures that are still standing today, thousands of years later — from Roman engineers who poured thick concrete sea barriers, to Maya masons who crafted plaster sculptures to their gods, to Chinese builders who raised walls against invaders.
Yet scores of more recent structures are already staring down their expiration dates: The concrete that makes up much of our modern world has a lifespan of around 50 to 100 years.
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A growing number of scientists have been studying materials from long-ago eras — chipping off chunks of buildings, poring over historical texts, mixing up copycat recipes — hoping to uncover how they've held up for millennia.
This reverse engineering has turned up a surprising list of ingredients that were mixed into old buildings — materials such as tree bark, volcanic ash, rice, beer and even urine. These unexpected add-ins could be key to some pretty impressive properties, like the ability to get stronger over time and "heal" cracks when they form.
Figuring out how to copy those features could have real impacts today: While our modern concrete has the strength to hold up massive skyscrapers and heavy infrastructure, it can't compete with the endurance of these ancient materials.
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And with the rising threats of climate change, there's a growing call to make construction more sustainable. A recent UN report estimates that the built environment is responsible for more than a third of global CO2 emissions — and cement production alone makes up more than 7% of those emissions.
"If you improve the properties of the material by using … traditional recipes from Maya people or the ancient Chinese, you can produce material that can be used in modern construction in a much more sustainable way," said Carlos Rodriguez-Navarro, a cultural heritage researcher at Spain's University of Granada.
Is ancient Roman concrete better than today's?
Many researchers have turned to the Romans for inspiration. Starting around 200 BCE, the architects of the Roman Empire were building impressive concrete structures that have stood the test of time — from the soaring dome of the Pantheon to the sturdy aqueducts that still carry water today.
Even in harbors, where seawater has been battering structures for ages, you'll find concrete "basically the way it was when it was poured 2,000 years ago," said John Oleson, an archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada.
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Most modern concrete starts with Portland cement, a powder made by heating limestone and clay to super-high temperatures and grinding them up. That cement is mixed with water to create a chemically reactive paste. Then, chunks of material like rock and gravel are added, and the cement paste binds them into a concrete mass.
According to records from ancient architects like Vitruvius, the Roman process was similar. The ancient builders mixed materials like burnt limestone and volcanic sand with water and gravel, creating chemical reactions to bind everything together.
Now, scientists think they've found a key reason why some Roman concrete has held up structures for thousands of years: The ancient material has an unusual power to repair itself. Exactly how is not yet clear, but scientists are starting to find clues.
In a study published earlier this year, Admir Masic, a civil and environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed that this power comes from chunks of lime that are studded throughout the Roman material instead of being mixed in evenly. Researchers used to think these chunks were a sign that the Romans weren't mixing up their materials well enough.
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Instead, after analyzing concrete samples from Privernum — an ancient city outside of Rome — the scientists found that the chunks could fuel the material's "self-healing" abilities. When cracks form, water is able to seep into the concrete, Masic explained. That water activates the leftover pockets of lime, sparking up new chemical reactions that can fill in the damaged sections.
Marie Jackson, a geologist at the University of Utah, has a different take. Her research has found that the key could be in the specific volcanic materials used by the Romans.
The builders would gather volcanic rocks left behind after eruptions to mix into their concrete. This naturally reactive material changes over time as it interacts with the elements, Jackson said, allowing it to seal cracks that develop.
The ability to keep adapting over time "is truly the genius of the material," Jackson said. "The concrete was so well designed that it sustains itself."
Using tree juice to make sculptures as strong as seashells
At Copan, a Maya site in Honduras, intricate lime sculptures and temples remain intact even after more than 1,000 years exposed to a hot, humid environment. And according to a study published earlier this year, the secret to these structures' longevity might lie in the trees that sprout among them.
Researchers here had a living link to the structures' creators: They met with local masons in Honduras who traced their lineage all the way back to the Mayan builders, explained Rodriguez-Navarro, who worked on the study.
The masons suggested using extracts from local chukum and jiote trees in the lime mix. When researchers tested out the recipe — collecting bark, putting the chunks in water and adding the resulting tree "juice" into the material — they found the resulting plaster was especially durable against physical and chemical damage.
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When scientists zoomed in, they saw that bits of organic material from the tree juice got incorporated into the plaster's molecular structure. In this way, the Mayan plaster was able to mimic sturdy natural structures like seashells and sea urchin spines — and borrow some of their toughness, Rodriguez-Navarro said.
Studies have found all kinds of natural materials mixed into structures from long ago: fruit extracts, milk, cheese curd, beer, even dung and urine. The mortar that holds together some of China's most famous structures — including the Great Wall and the Forbidden City — includes traces of starch from sticky rice.
Luck or skill?
Some of these ancient builders might have just gotten lucky, said Cecilia Pesce, a materials scientist at the University of Sheffield in England. They'd toss just about anything into their mixes, as long as it was cheap and available — and the ones that didn't work out have long since collapsed.
"They would put all sorts of things in construction," Pesce said. "And now, we only have the buildings that survived. So it's like a natural selection process."
But some materials seem to show more intention — like in India, where builders crafted blends of local materials to produce different properties, said Thirumalini Selvaraj, a civil engineer and professor at India's Vellore Institute of Technology.
According to Selvaraj's research, in humid areas of India, builders used local herbs that help structures deal with moisture. Along the coast, they added jaggery, an unrefined sugar, which can help protect from salt damage. And in areas with higher earthquake risks, they used super-light "floating bricks" made with rice husks.
"They know the region, they know the soil condition, they know the climate," Selvaraj said. "So they engineer a material according to this."
Ancient Roman ... skyscrapers?
Today's builders can't just copy the ancient recipes. Even though Roman concrete lasted a long time, it couldn't hold up heavy loads: "You couldn't build a modern skyscraper with Roman concrete," Oleson said. "It would collapse when you got to the third story."
Instead, researchers are trying to take some of the ancient material's specialties and add them into modern mixes. Masic is part of a startup that is trying to build new projects using Roman-inspired, "self-healing" concrete. And Jackson is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to design concrete structures that can hold up well in seawater — like the ones in Roman ports — to help protect coastlines from sea level rise.
We don't need to make things last quite as long as the Romans did to have an impact, Masic said. If we add 50 or 100 years to concrete's lifespan, "we will require less demolition, less maintenance and less material in the long run."
Study on dengue vaccine shows promising result in Bangladesh
A dengue vaccine, which has been tested in a clinical study in Bangladesh, is showing encouraging results in combating the viral disease.
In a groundbreaking collaboration, researchers from icddr,b (International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh) and the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont (UVM), USA have embarked on the first study of a promising tetravalent dengue vaccine in dengue-endemic Bangladesh, according to a press release on Thursday.
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Their efforts, centred around evaluating the single-dose tetravalent dengue vaccine candidate TV005, have yielded promising results, demonstrating safety and immune responsiveness in both children and adults. These findings have been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, it said.
Lead investigator and senior scientist D. Rashidul Haque of icddr,b emphasised on the critical importance of this work for Bangladesh, a nation plagued by severe dengue outbreaks.
Dr Kirkpatrick from UVM highlighted TV005's unique features, including its single-dose administration and its ability to stimulate immune responses against all four dengue serotypes, making it a promising candidate for endemic regions like South Asia.
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As of September 25, 2023, the ongoing outbreak has resulted in 190,758 hospitalizations and over 920 deaths throughout Bangladesh. Currently, fluid management and symptom control are the only available treatments, underscoring the urgency of developing a tetravalent dengue vaccine.
The icddr,b and UVM research teams initiated the "Dengue in Dhaka Initiative (DIDI)" in 2015, marking the first research endeavor on dengue vaccines in Bangladesh.
Their collaborative efforts aimed to advance dengue vaccine development across the country. The study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases represented a significant phase II randomized and controlled clinical trial, said the release.
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Over three years, starting in 2016, nearly 200 volunteers across four age groups (1-49 years) received either the TV005 vaccine or a placebo. TV005 proved well-tolerated, with most volunteers developing antibodies to all four dengue serotypes, especially those with previous dengue exposure. While the study wasn't designed to assess efficacy, no dengue cases were reported among vaccinated individuals. These results bring the TV005 vaccine closer to widespread use, paving the way for large-scale phase III efficacy trials, it also said.
UVM's Vaccine Testing Centre (VTC) has been evaluating dengue vaccines developed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2009. The UVM team, led by Dr Kirkpatrick, collaborated closely with experts like Dr Stephen Whitehead, who played a crucial role in designing the TV005 vaccine. This collaboration has contributed significantly to dengue vaccine research in the United States and beyond, added the release.
Several pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi and Takeda, have also made progress with tetravalent dengue vaccines, completing their own phase III trials.
Operation to extract American researcher from one of the world's deepest caves advances to 700m
Rescue teams on Sunday in Turkey successfully carried an American researcher up from the depth of a cave at 1040 meters (3412.07 feet) to the 700-meter (2296.59 feet) mark where he will rest at a base camp before they continue the taxing journey to the surface.
An experienced caver, Mark Dickey, 40, started vomiting on Sept. 2 because of stomach bleeding while on an expedition with a handful of others in the Morca cave in southern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains, one of the deepest in the world, according to experts.
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A rescue operation began Saturday afternoon with doctors, paramedics and experienced cavers from across Europe rushing to help. They set up small medical base camps at various levels along the shaft, providing Dickey an opportunity to rest during the slow and arduous extrication.
“Mark was delivered to the campsite at -700 meters as of 03:24 local time (GMT+3). At this stage, he will set out again after resting and having the necessary treatments,” the Speleological Federation of Turkey wrote on its official account on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Turkish authorities said there are 190 personnel from eight countries taking part in the operation, 153 of them search and rescue experts.
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The most challenging part of the rescue operation is widening the narrow cave passages to allow stretcher lines to pass through at low depths, Yusuf Ogrenecek of the speleological federation previously said.
The extraction is expected to take up to 10 days depending on his condition.