The University of Huddersfield’s Archaeogenetics Research Group has mapped out the dispersal of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, responsible for the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, putting Europe centre-stage as the main source of the spread.

The group’s findings, recently published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Microorganisms, confirm that the virus originated in China and most likely jumped into humans from horseshoe bats. But that it is Europe, not China, which has been the main source for spreading the disease around the world.

The research also suggests that travel restrictions across Britain and Europe seem to have been too little and too late and that the actual spread of the virus to America and other parts of the world was largely via Europe, and not directly from China.

The study focused on 27,000 virus genomes, sampled from all around the world. The researchers usually work on tracking ancient human migrations using mitochondrial DNA, and they capitalised on the fact that the virus genome is similar in crucial respects.

Still, the mammoth size of the database, even back in May when the study began, makes this one of the biggest analyses of its kind ever undertaken.

The intensive data analyses were carried out by clinical geneticist Dr Teresa Rito and evolutionary geneticist Dr Pedro Soares. Both are based at the University of Minho, in Portugal and have worked closely with the University of Huddersfield’s Professor Martin Richards and Dr Maria Pala, as part of the Archaeogenetics Research Group, on many occasions. The pair called upon the knowledge and expertise of their colleagues in the UK to help make sense of the data and publish their conclusions in double-quick time.

Professor Richards explained how there is a huge ongoing worldwide effort to understand the spread of the coronavirus and that researchers are trying to make their work available to the public as fast as possible.

As the world continues to face a rapidly spreading pathogen, Dr Pala believes a greater understanding of the virus will better inform and improve upon policies designed to control the spread.

“With thousands of lives still at risk,” added Dr Pala, “the need for scientific research is now more crucial than ever.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Huddersfield. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

David Vanness, professor of health policy and administration, led a team of researchers that created a simulation to consider health care treatment costs, insurance premiums, quality of life, and life expectancy to explore whether a treatment delivers enough value for its costs to be considered beneficial for population health.

According to Vanness, the term “treatment cost” in this research incorporates all the costs and savings related to a treatment. For example, the cost of a treatment to lower blood cholesterol would include how much it costs but also take into account potential savings for preventing a heart attack and its subsequent treatment.

“We know that we are spending more and more on health care in the U.S. and that we’re getting less and less for it,” Vanness said. “We do a good job of developing new treatments in this country, but we don’t do a good job of covering everybody or making sure that people have access to basic health care. We’re spending a lot on our medical treatments, but many of those treatments just don’t have a lot of value.”

Vanness added that in order to improve a population’s health without spending too much, it’s important to be able to tell whether the prices drug and device manufacturers are charging are justified by what they deliver in health improvements.

The researchers found that in their simulation, for every $10,000,000 increase in health care expenditures, 1860 people became uninsured. This led to five deaths, 81 quality-adjusted life-years lost due to death, and 15 quality-adjusted life-years lost due to illness. In health care economics, one quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is equal to one year of perfect health.

Vanness said these results — recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine — suggests a cost effectiveness threshold of $104,000 per QALY.

“If a treatment is beneficial but it costs more than about $100,000 to gain one quality-adjusted life-year using that treatment, then it may not be a good deal,” Vanness said. “Because our simulation was using data estimates, we wanted to come up with a range of plausible values. So anything over a range of $100,000 to $150,000 per QALY gained is likely to actually make our population’s health fall.”

To create the simulation, Vanness said he and the other researchers used a variety of data, starting with estimates about how likely people are to drop their insurance when their premiums go up.

“We also used evidence from the public health literature on what happens to people’s health and mortality when they gain or lose health insurance,” Vanness said.

The simulation then compiled that data and estimated how much the health of a population goes down when costs increase. According to Vanness, that relationship determines the cost-effectiveness threshold — how much a treatment can cost relative to the health benefits it gives before it causes more harm than good.

The researchers said the findings could be especially important to organizations like the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which provides analysis to several private and public insurers to help negotiate prices with manufacturers. These organizations could use the findings as empirical evidence for what makes a treatment a good value in the U.S.

“Moving forward, I think some changes could be made to national policy to make cost effectiveness analysis more commonly used,” Vanness said. “Our goal is to get that information out there with the hope that somebody is going to use it to help guide coverage or maybe get manufacturers to reduce their prices on some of these drugs.”

James Lomas, University of York, and Hannah Ahn, a Penn State graduate students, also participated in this work.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Penn State. Original written by Katie Bohn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Conventional solar cells can be either “wet type” (solution based) or “dry type” (made up of metal-oxide semiconductors). Of these, dry-type solar cells have a slight edge over the wet-type ones: they are more reliable, eco-friendly, and cost-effective. Moreover, metal-oxides are well-suited to make use of the UV light. Despite all this, however, the potential of metal-oxide TPVs has not been fully explored until now.

To this end, researchers from Incheon National University, Republic of Korea, came up with an innovative design for a metal-oxide-based TPV device. They inserted an ultra-thin layer of silicon (Si) between two transparent metal-oxide semiconductors with the goal of developing an efficient TPV device. These findings were published in a study in Nano Energy, which was made available online on August 10, 2020 (ahead of the scheduled final publication in the December 2020 issue). Prof Joondong Kim, who led the study, explains, “Our aim was to devise a high-power-producing transparent solar cell, by embedding an ultra-thin film of amorphous Si between zinc oxide and nickel oxide.”

This novel design consisting of the Si film had three major advantages. First, it allowed for the utilization of longer-wavelength light (as opposed to bare TPVs). Second, it resulted in efficient photon collection. Third, it allowed for the faster transport of charged particles to the electrodes. Moreover, the design can potentially generate electricity even under low-light situations (for instance, on cloudy or rainy days). The scientists further confirmed the power-generating ability of the device by using it to operate the DC motor of a fan.

Based on these findings, the research team is optimistic that the real-life applicability of this new TPV design will soon be possible. As for potential applications, there are plenty, as Prof Kim explains, “We hope to extend the use of our TPV design to all kinds of material, right from glass buildings to mobile devices like electric cars, smartphones, and sensors.” Not just this, the team is excited to take their design to the next level, by using innovative materials such as 2D semiconductors, nanocrystals of metal-oxides, and sulfide semiconductors. As Prof Kim concludes, “Our research is essential for a sustainable green future — especially to connect the clean energy system with no or minimal carbon footprint.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Incheon National University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

As published in ACS Materials Letters, the team’s atmospheric water irrigation system uses super-moisture-absorbent gels to capture water from the air. When the soil is heated to a certain temperature, the gels release the water, making it available to plants. When the soil distributes water, some of it goes back into the air, increasing humidity and making it easier to continue the harvesting cycle.

“Enabling free-standing agriculture in areas where it’s hard to build up irrigation and power systems is crucial to liberating crop farming from the complex water supply chain as resources become increasingly scarce,” said Guihua Yu, associate professor of materials science in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Each gram of soil can extract approximately 3-4 grams of water. Depending on the crops, approximately 0.1 to 1 kilogram of the soil can provide enough water to irrigate about a square meter of farmland.

The gels in the soil pull water out of the air during cooler, more humid periods at night. Solar heat during the day activates the water-containing gels to release their contents into soil.

The team ran experiments on the roof of the Cockrell School’s Engineering Teaching Center building at UT Austin to test the soil. They found that the hydrogel soil was able to retain water better than sandy soils found in dry areas, and it needed far less water to grow plants.

During a four-week experiment, the team found that its soil retained approximately 40% of the water quantity it started with. In contrast, the sandy soil had only 20% of its water left after just one week.

In another experiment, the team planted radishes in both types of soil. The radishes in the hydrogel soil all survived a 14-day period without any irrigation beyond an initial round to make sure the plants took hold. Radishes in the sandy soil were irrigated several times during the first four days of the experiment. None of the radishes in the sandy soil survived more than two days after the initial irrigation period.

“Most soil is good enough to support the growth of plants,” said Fei Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Yu’s research group who led the study with Xingyi Zhou and Panpan Zhang. “It’s the water that is the main limitation, so that is why we wanted to develop a soil that can harvest water from the ambient air.”

The water-harvesting soil is the first big application of technology that Yu’s group has been working on for more than two years. Last year, the team developed the capability to use gel-polymer hybrid materials that work like “super sponges,” extracting large amounts of water from the ambient air, cleaning it and quickly releasing it using solar energy.

The researchers envision several other applications of the technology. It could potentially be used for cooling solar panels and data centers. It could expand access to drinking water, either through individual systems for households or larger systems for big groups such as workers or soldiers.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.