188 articles from FRIDAY 9.7.2021

Trial shows that the antibiotic azithromycin does not prevent mild COVID-19 cases progressing to hospitalization or death

A new study (the ATOMIC2 trial), presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and published simultaneously in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, shows the antimicrobial drug azithromycin - already approved for use in multiple infections - does not prevent mild COVID-19 cases progressing to hospitalisation or death.

Turn off the blue light!

Researchers from University of Tsukuba have found that exposure to specific types of light before sleep can have variable effects on energy metabolism during sleep. Specifically, participants who went to sleep after exposure to organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which emit polychromatic white light that contains less blue light than light-emitting diodes (LEDs), exhibited significantly...

Using mice to open the way to prevent blocked arteries

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have identified important parts of the pathway by which a high-fat diet affects the body's immune response, leading eventually to atherosclerosis. Working with mouse models, they clarified how histone H3 citrullination activates neutrophils with serum CXCL1 elevation. Identifying these steps could lead to new diagnostic tools and...

Early Earth was bombarded by series of city-sized asteroids

Scientists know that the Earth was bombarded by huge impactors in distant time, but a new analysis suggests that the number of these impacts may have been 10 times higher than previously thought. This translates into a barrage of collisions—similar in scale to that of the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs—on average every 15 million years between 2.5 and 3.5 billion years ago. Some...