News Archives: July, 2020

By Becky Vuksta’s calculations, the new socially distanced dining-hall setup at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., will serve 12 students a minute, or 720 students per hour. Not bad, but still not fast enough to feed the school’s 2,700 students in the rush between classes.

The University of Montana’s Family Medicine Residency of Western Montana just received a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration. UM’s program is now one of 20 throughout the country to receive an award for residency training in primary care. The grant will enhance training for resident physicians in rural or underserved areas, while encouraging graduates to pursue careers in rural and underserved primary care after completion of training.

Assistant mechanical engineering professor Saikat Basu was the first SDSU researcher to have a proposal for COVID-19 research receive NSF funding . He is working with researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to design a reusable mask with a respirator that will capture and kill the novel coronavirus.

ACE2 to Predict Outcomes in Infection with SARS-CoV-2 - John Arthur, M.D., Ph.D. Laura James, M.D. COVID-19 severity ranges from asymptomatic to deadly, but currently there is no way to predict which patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 will develop severe symptoms. Arthur and his team are investigating approaches to accurately make this prediction on the basis of specific features of proteins and DNA in the blood of individual patients. Identifying patients at highest risk of severe disease could save lives by designating the appropriate treatment at an early stage.

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) scientists have initiated many successful research projects as part of the global response to SARS CoV-2, (virus that causes COVID-19). These studies seek to prevent, diagnose and treat the disease; others aim to understand how it spreads and how people’s immune systems respond.

Americans may not remember where they were the first time they heard “flattening the curve,” but they’ll forever remember the reason — COVID-19. There’s an information curve that follows this epidemiological one like a shadow. It’s less predictable, but treatable, and University of Arkansas Little Rock Prof. Nitin Agarwal and his students are experts.

Our lives, comfort, and well-being have come to depend on the development of new materials for everything ranging from smart electronics to implantable medical devices. The U.S. National Science Foundation fosters collaboration and innovation among universities, national laboratories, industry, and international scientific organizations through its Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers. These centers work to address critical challenges in material science such as extreme miniaturization, self-folding atomically thin "paper" materials, on-demand assembly of nanoparticles, materials behavior under extreme conditions, and the quantum revolution.

July 7 – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) announced selections totaling up to $1.7 million for four projects that will advance innovation in smart manufacturing. The selected projects will create educational programs that support smart-manufacturing technologies, processes, and workforce development.

It would take a human being years to read tens of thousands of scholarly articles, but an artificial intelligence system that can do it in a matter of minutes is about to go to work in the fight against COVID-19. Ilya Safro, an associate professor of computer science at Clemson University, said that his team will soon roll out a new artificial intelligence system aimed at helping researchers explore the scientific literature as they strive for new discoveries to combat the novel coronavirus.

Melinda Harman of Clemson University is volunteering her time to explore how hospitals could wash and sanitize medical masks without having to ship them elsewhere or buy an expensive piece of equipment. A device that Harman designed to hold multiple N95 masks is central to her idea. It would help ensure the masks maintain their shape while being washed so that they continue to fit securely around the mouth and nose, said Harman, an associate professor of bioengineering and director of Clemson University’s Medical Device Recycling and Reprocessing program, or GreenMD. The masks help prevent healthcare workers from inhaling the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and have been in short supply since the pandemic began.