ANOTHER FORM OF TRADE DUMPING

More than half Canada's AstraZeneca vaccine came from U.S. plant accused by FDA of quality-control problems

Close to two thirds of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine imported into Canada came from a U.S. factory that American authorities say was rife with quality-control issues, Health Canada confirmed Thursday.

 Provided by National Post The Emergent BioSolutions plant in Baltimore, Maryland.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said this week it will not allow the release of any vaccine made under contract at the Emergent Biosolutions plant in Baltimore, Md. — and still in the U.S.— until it’s been tested further.

But Health Canada said AstraZeneca has assured the government a contamination event at the Emergent plant that led to a recent FDA inspection had no impact on the 1.5 million doses of its vaccine shipped here.

“All products in Canada met authorized specifications before they were released to the market,” Anna Madison, a spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement.

U.S. removes AstraZeneca from plant that ruined 15 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine

White House says removal of AstraZeneca vaccine from U.S. plant will not affect dose output

“COVID-19 vaccines are subjected to the same independent, rigorous scientific reviews, quality standards, testing and post-market surveillance as all other vaccines approved for use in Canada.”


Madison said the last of the 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine made at the Emergent plant were distributed to the provinces the week of April 5.

Though uptake on that particular shot was slow at first, its use has surged in recent days after some provinces made it available to a broader age range of Canadians. B.C. authorities said Thursday they had all but expended their allotment.

Canada also obtained 500,000 AstraZeneca doses made under contract by a company in India, and 300,000 manufactured in South Korea through the COVAX project.

AstraZeneca said in a statement Thursday the vaccine it sent to Canada in March was done so at the request of the U.S. government and “met the stringent requirements” the firm must follow.

“Required safety tests and quality control measures are carried out at each step of the production process,” the company said. “All checks were met prior to the release of the batches.”

The Food and Drug Administration released a report Wednesday that outlined a number of issues with Emergent’s Bayview plant in Baltimore that it said could potentially affect the quality of the products it made.

They ranged from inadequate training of staff to not cleaning equipment at appropriate intervals to “prevent contamination that would alter the safety, identity, strength, quality or purity of the drug substance.”

Emergent had earlier agreed with the agency to halt production at the plant until the problems are fixed.

In the meantime, the FDA said that none of the vaccine made at the factory so far would be distributed in the United States.

“For the vaccines already manufactured, the products will undergo additional testing and will be thoroughly evaluated to ensure their quality before any potential distribution,” the agency said in a news release. “We will not allow the release of any product until we feel confident that it meets our expectations for quality.”

Amir Attaran, a law professor and drug-policy expert at the University of Ottawa, said any of the Emergent-made vaccine not already administered in Canada should now be shelved.

And he said he’s not even sure if potential problems could be uncovered by an inspection after the fact.

“It is impossible to “inspect in” high quality to a product that started life as low quality,” charged Attaran. “There is absolutely no option but to throw these doses away, like the other doses manufactured in that factory which the Americans are not allowing to be used. No way should Canadians be offered these doses.”

Emergent has manufactured vaccine under contract for both AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Controversy first erupted in March when it was revealed that cross-contamination at the Baltimore plant had ruined 15 million doses of the J&J product.

U.S. media reports indicated that the contamination came from the harmless virus used in the AstraZeneca vaccine being manufactured in the same facility.

The companies agreed after the incident to no longer make AstraZeneca’s shot at the plant to avoid any cross-contamination, while the FDA carried out an extensive inspection of the facility that finished on Tuesday.

The resulting report outlined a number of issues around the company’s investigation into the Johnson & Johnson incident, saying it had failed to thoroughly probe the “unexplained discrepancies.”

But the report, citing security camera footage and other evidence, also detailed several other, broader concerns about how the facility operated.

It said the building was not maintained in a “clean and sanitary condition,” saying for instance that waste is not properly decontaminated before being taken through the warehouse for disposal.

There were also areas of peeling paint and damaged wall boards, which would undermine Emergent’s ability to clean and disinfect the area.

The warehouse was also overcrowded with materials destined for the manufacturing process and samples for quality control, said the report.

Provided by National Post A bottle of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

Among other concerns, it also said Emergent had failed to adequately train workers involved in manufacturing, quality control and other areas to “prevent cross contamination of bulk drug substances.”

AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been clouded somewhat by suspicions it is linked to a rare blood-clotting problem. But scientists say the benefits of taking the shot — and avoiding seriously COVID-19 illness — easily outweigh slim risks.

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FDA pens stinging report on Emergent COVID vaccine plant

April 22, 2021

Emergent BioSolutions’ difficult month has been made worse by an FDA report into its facility in Baltimore, which has been blamed for the wastage of millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. 

The US regulator says it completed an inspection of the Bayview plant run by the contract manufacturing organisation (CMO) which uncovered a string of violations including that the building was “not maintained in a clean and sanitary condition”.

The inspectors found peeling paint and damaged floors and walls that would prevent adequate cleaning, and waste materials that weren’t properly decontaminated before being shipped to other areas of the facility.

Some employees were observed throwing unsealed bags of medical waste into a service elevator leading to the plant’s warehouse, for example, and there were also failings in the plant’s size and design, worker training and handling of raw materials.

The FDA’s closeout letter refers specifically to the cross-contamination incident that led to 15 million doses of the J&J shot being jettisoned when ingredients destined for AstraZeneca’s AZD1222 shot were accidentally mixed into vials of the J&J product.

As a result, J&J said it had assumed “full responsibility” for making the COVID-19 vaccine material at the plant, while AZ pulled out of using the facility altogether. At the time, Emergent suggested that one batch of the vaccine failed quality controls, and no contamination took place.

The report notes that the cross-contamination was not investigated properly, which raises concerns that other batches may have also been affected.

Production at the facility has been halted while the company works with the FDA to try to resolve the deficiencies, and all stocks of the J&J vaccine already produced – said to be around 62 million doses – will have to be re-tested for quality before they can be distributed.

The plant reportedly also had to destroy millions of doses of AZ’s vaccine between October 2020 and January 2021 due to suspected contamination.

As the plant hadn’t been approved to supply the J&J vaccine none of the shots have been used in the US vaccination programme, which has been placed on hold while the US investigates a link between the shot and blood clotting side effects. AZ’s vaccine meanwhile has yet to be approved in the US.

The EU regulator said this week that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh a very small risk of clots, clearing the way for the rollout of the one-shot vaccine to resume. An FDA decision is expected tomorrow.

Award of federal contract probed

The problems at the Emergent plant have also prompted an investigation by Democrat members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform into the award of a federal contract to make the vaccines.

The CMO’s chief executive – Robert Kramer – has been asked to testify before the group’s coronavirus subcommittee.

Reps Carolyn Maloney and James Clyburn say they are investigating “reports that Emergent received multi-million-dollar contracts to manufacture coronavirus vaccines despite a long, documented history of inadequately trained staff and quality control issues”.

They note that the company received $628 million in June 2020 to establish the main US facility for making the J&J and AZ vaccines, and in particular are interested in the role played by Dr Robert Kadlec, who served as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response under President Trump and previously worked as a consultant for Emergent.

They say Kadlec “appears to have pushed for this award despite indications that Emergent did not have the ability to reliably fulfil the contract”.

https://www.biospace.com/

The Cryogenic Hydrogen Powertrain That Will Transform Propulsion
Caroline Delbert 
POPULAR MECHANICS

4/23/2021

© Airbus/Handout Airbus’s new powertrain could help electric propulsion systems perform better in low-emission aircraft. The secret is using liquid hydrogen.

Airbus’s new powertrain could help electric propulsion systems perform better in low-emission aircraft.

The secret is using liquid hydrogen to supercool engine parts to a superconducting state.
For now, the system is in ground-based demonstrations.

In the ongoing fight against carbon emissions, air travel has a particularly bad position because of the industry’s reliance on high speeds, light weights, and fossil fuels. But Airbus’s new superconducting powertrain, which is cooled by super cold liquid hydrogen, may solve some of those pressing problems.

The new system—named Advanced Superconducting & Cryogenic Experimental powertrain Demonstrator (ASCEND)—is in ground-based demonstrations. The three-year project“aims to show that an electric- or hybrid-electric propulsion system can be more than 2 to 3 times lighter than a conventional system without compromising a 97 [percent] powertrain efficiency,” Airbus says.

If it works, ASCEND could be a landmark achievement in future-looking aeronautics. The snag facing electric aircraft designs mostly comes down to a matter of weight. On the ground, cars can add up to 1,000 pounds worth of batteries. But in the sky, that could mean the difference between an aircraft flying or sinking. Passenger planes in particular are already a very finely balanced system.

Airbus’s hydrogen powertrain is made up of a superconducting distribution system, a cryogenically cooled motor control unit, and a superconducting motor. The overall goal is to put the entire powertrain into a superconducting state, meaning with virtually no electrical resistance.

At that point, its power density could greatly exceed the burden of the added weight of electrical power. That’s why liquid hydrogen is key, Airbus says:
“[I]f a cold source at 20°K (-253.15°C), such as liquid hydrogen, is available on board, it can be used to cool the electrical systems. The superconducting components can then work to significantly improve the power density of the electric-propulsion systems.”

© Airbus/Handout ascend infographic

How did this all come about? Well, liquid hydrogen is already considered the leading candidate to transition commercial airliners away from fossil fuels. That’s for several reasons, but liquid hydrogen is able to slot into existing engineering in a way electric propulsion hasn’t before now.

What Airbus is suggesting is a marriage of hydrogen and electric. Liquid hydrogen has to be supercooled to be used at all, and Airbus realized that cold hydrogen itself became a new available resource. It’s like air-cooled car engines, which utilize the air rushing through the engine anyway and turn it into an asset.

For now, the system is only on the ground as engineers work on it for demonstrations. If ASCEND makes it to primetime, it will approach parity with traditional fossil fuel aircraft, Airbus says. Airliners are a special case, but Vancouver-based Harbour Air is working on electrifying its fleet of small local planes. It’s possible to do—it’s just difficult or impossible to scale up to jumbo jets.

Certainly no“regular” electric plane can compete with something that runs on superconducting electrics, so if Airbus brings ASCEND into its fleets in future decades, the manufacturer will essentially have the sky to itself.

Violence-legitimizing verses in ABRAHAMIC religious scriptures increase support for lethal violence

A survey experiment among Christians, Muslims and Jews in seven countries shows the mobilizing potential of religious scripture

WZB BERLIN SOCIAL SCIENCE CENTER

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE GRAPH SHOWS RESULTS FOR SEVEN COUNTRIES: GERMANY, THE UNITED STATES, CYPRUS, LEBANON, ISRAEL, THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES, AND KENYA view more 

CREDIT: WZB

Extremist perpetrators of violence often quote verses from their religion's holy scriptures that authorize, or even prescribe, attacks on enemies of the faith. Abdullah H., the Syrian now on trial who stabbed a homosexual couple with a knife and killed a man in Dresden in October 2020, also testified that he had been inspired to commit the crime by a Quranic sura. However, whether the religious motivation that extremist perpetrators of violence emphasize is causally related to their actions is often doubted. Now, WZB researchers Ruud Koopmans and Eylem Kanol can prove for the first time that verses in religious scriptures that legitimize violence can increase support for killing enemies of the faith.

Together with Dietlind Stolle, a German-Canadian political scientist, they designed an experimental study in which they asked 8,000 Christians, Muslims, and Jews in seven countries (Germany, the United States, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Kenya) whether or not they thought lethal violence against enemies of the faith was justified. Half of the respondents were asked the question without any introduction, while the other half were first presented with a quote from the Bible, Koran, or Torah that endorsed violence against alleged enemies of the faith.

The results show that reference to scriptural passages legitimizing violence significantly increased support for lethal violence in all three religions and in all seven countries (see graph). However, this effect was weaker among Jews and Christians than among Muslims. Across all seven countries, 9 percent of Christian believers supported violence without receiving a scriptural quote beforehand, against 12 percent among those who were given such a quote. Among Jewish believers, the figures were 3 and 7 percent, respectively. Among Muslims, 29 percent supported violence against enemies of the faith without and 47 percent with prior reference to a Quranic quote. In Germany, however, these figures were considerably lower: among German Christians, support for violence was 2 without and 3 percent with a biblical quotation; among German Muslims, 5 without and 16 percent with a Koran quotation (seeh graph).

The most important reason for the differences between the three religions, the researchers show, is the larger proportion of Muslim believers who adhere to a fundamentalist interpretation of their faith. Fundamentalist believers are characterized by the fact that they take the holy scriptures of their religion literally and consider them to be unambiguously valid in the present. Therefore, they are comparatively more susceptible to attempts to legitimize violence by referring to religious scriptural sources.

The findings have significance for countering religious extremism. "Religious causes and motivations must be taken seriously. Violence should not be reduced to socio-economic and psychological causes alone," says Ruud Koopmans, director at the WZB. The task of religious leaders and associations, he says, must be to actively counter fundamentalist interpretations of faith and to promote interpretations that take the historical and social context into consideration.

US and Iranian researchers collaborate on Lake Urmia restoration

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: IRAN'S LAKE URMIA -- A SISTER TO UTAH'S GREAT SALT LAKE -- HAS LOST NEARLY 95 PERCENT OF ITS VOLUME IN THE SPAN OF TWO DECADES. view more 

CREDIT: SOMAYEH SIMA

In a rare exchange, scientists and water resources engineers from Iran and Utah are collaborating on a bold scientific study to restore one of the world's largest saline lakes.

Lake Urmia -- a massive salt lake in Iran's northwest and a sister to Utah's Great Salt Lake -- has lost nearly 95 percent of its volume over the last two decades. As water levels drop, salinity spikes, threatening the lake's brine shrimp population and the flamingos and other bird species that depend on the shrimp for food. Lake levels are so low that at some coastal resorts, tourism boats must be pulled a kilometer (0.6 mile) or more from shore by tractor before reaching suitable depths. In addition, new land bridges are forming in the drying lake bed which allows mainland predators to threaten endangered mammals living in the southern islands. The vast, dry lakebed imposes a growing dust problem for the five million residents who live in the Lake Urmia basin. What's more, the area's ecotourism industry has collapsed, and now experts fear an environmental disaster awaits if drastic changes are not made.

"We're at the tipping point," said professor and lead author Somayeh Sima of Tarbiat Modares University in Iran. "Every single step matters. We have to take action now." Sima's work will be used to update Iran's $1 billion Lake Urmia Restoration Program. In 2018, she traveled to Utah on a visiting scholarship from the Semnani Family Foundation to collaborate with Utah State University water resources professor David Rosenberg who studies integrated water management and water conservation in Western U.S. river basins, including rivers that feed the Great Salt Lake. Prof. Wayne Wurtsbaugh, Sarah Null, and Karin Kettenring from the USU Quinney College of Natural Resources also collaborated in the limnology and ecology parts of this multidisciplinary research.

The team synthesized 40 years of data to define eight metrics that define the health of Lake Urmia and its many ecosystems. Their findings were published in the latest edition of the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies. One key finding shows that setting a target water level will not necessarily solve Lake Urmia's problems.

"We can't say that restoring the lake to some magic number will improve the overall situation," said Rosenberg. "Instead, we need to consider how the lake's ecosystem services are interconnected and how a varying lake level will impact those systems over time."

"We have to embrace lake level variability and focus our restoration efforts where it makes sense," Sima added. "Restoration is not an easy task. It is everyone's responsibility, and we'll need public support to make meaningful change."

The problems facing Lake Urmia are not unique to Iran. Water levels at the Great Salt Lake are also at their lowest in recent years, and similar problems of land bridges, dust, changes in salinity, and ecological damage have experts concerned.

To promote transparency and reproducibility in science and encourage further collaborations, the researchers published their article open access (free to readers) and shared their data and code on the HydroShare.org repository.

"This partnership between U.S. and Iranian researchers is valuable because we have so much in common on this topic, said Sima. "Only together can we begin to understand how to solve these problems."

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Seismicity on Mars full of surprises, in first continuous year of data

SEISMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Research News

 

The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far.

At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zürich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that detects marsquakes and curates the planet's seismicity catalog.

Marsquakes differ from earthquakes in a number of ways, Ceylan explained. To begin with, they are much smaller than earthquakes, with the largest event recorded at teleseismic distances around magnitude 3.6. SEIS is able to detect these small events because the background seismic noise on Mars can be much lower than on Earth, without the constant tremor produced by ocean waves.

"For much of a Martian year, from around sunset until early hours, the Martian atmosphere becomes very quiet, so there is no local noise either," he said. "Additionally, our sensors are optimized and shielded for operating under severe Martian conditions, such as extremely low temperatures and the extreme diurnal temperature fluctuations on the red planet."

Marsquakes also come in two distinct varieties: low-frequency events with seismic waves propagating at various depths in the planet's mantle, and high-frequency events with waves that appear to propagate through the crust. "In terms of how the seismic energy decays over time, the low-frequency events appear to be more like earthquakes" in which the shaking dies away relatively quickly, Ceylan said, "while the high-frequency events are resembling moonquakes" in persisting for longer periods.

The vast majority of the events are high-frequency and occur at hundreds of kilometers of distance from the lander. "It is not quite clear to us how these events could be confined to only high frequency energy while they occur at such large distances," he said. "On top of that, the frequency of those events seems to vary over the Martian year, which is a pattern that we do not know at all from Earth."

Only a handful of marsquakes have clear seismic phase arrivals--the order in which the different types of seismic waves arrive at a location--which allows researchers to calculate the direction and distance the waves come from. All these marsquakes originate from a sunken area of the surface called Cerberus Fossae, about 1800 kilometers away from the InSight Lander.

Cerberus Fossae is one of the youngest geological structures on Mars, and may have formed from extensional faulting or subsidence due to dike emplacement. Recent studies suggest extension mechanism may be the source of the Cerberus Fossae quakes, Ceylan noted, "howe

DeepShake uses machine learning to rapidly estimate earthquake shaking intensity

SEISMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Research News

 

A deep spatiotemporal neural network trained on more than 36,000 earthquakes offers a new way of quickly predicting ground shaking intensity once an earthquake is underway, researchers report at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting.

DeepShake analyzes seismic signals in real time and issues advanced warning of strong shaking based on the characteristics of the earliest detected waves from an earthquake.

DeepShake was developed by Daniel J. Wu, Avoy Datta, Weiqiang Zhu and William Ellsworth at Stanford University.

The earthquake data used to train the DeepShake network came from seismic recordings of the 2019 Ridgecrest, California sequence. When its developers tested DeepShake's potential using the actual shaking of the 5 July magnitude 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake, the neural network sent simulated alerts between 7 and 13 seconds prior to the arrival of high intensity ground shaking to locations in the Ridgecrest area.

The authors stressed the novelty of using deep learning for rapid early warning and forecasting directly from seismic records alone. "DeepShake is able to pick up signals in seismic waveforms across dimensions of space and time," explained Datta.

DeepShake demonstrates the potential of machine learning models to improve the speed and accuracy of earthquake alert systems, he added.

"DeepShake aims to improve on earthquake early warnings by making its shaking estimates directly from ground motion observations, cutting out some of the intermediate steps used by more traditional warning systems," said Wu.

Many early warning systems first determine earthquake location and magnitude, and then calculate ground motion for a location based on ground motion prediction equations, Wu explained.

"Each of these steps can introduce error that can degrade the ground shaking forecast," he added.

To address this, the DeepShake team turned to a neural network approach. The series of algorithms that make up a neural network are trained without the researcher identifying which signals are "important" for the network to use in its predictions. The network learns which features optimally forecast the strength of future shaking directly from the data.

"We've noticed from building other neural networks for use in seismology that they can learn all sorts of interesting things, and so they might not need the epicenter and magnitude of the earthquake to make a good forecast," said Wu. "DeepShake is trained on a preselected network of seismic stations, so that the local characteristics of those stations become part of the training data."

"When training a machine learning model end to end, we really think that these models are able to leverage this additional information to improve accuracy," he said.

Wu, Datta and their colleagues see DeepShake as complementary to California's operational ShakeAlert, adding to the toolbox of earthquake early warning systems. "We're really excited about expanding DeepShake beyond Ridgecrest, and fortifying our work for the real world, including fail-cases such as downed stations and high network latency," added Datta.

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New alloy can directly reduce the weight of heat removal systems by a third

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MISIS

Research News

 

The new alloys created by NUST MISIS scientists in cooperation with LG Electronics will help reduce the weight of radiators and heat removal systems in electric vehicles and consumer electronics by one third. The research results are published in the Journal of Magnesium and Alloys.

According to experts, with the development of electronics the problem of efficient heat removal is becoming more and more acute -- with an increase in the productivity of equipment, heat generation also grows. Reducing the temperature directly affects the prolongation of the devices' life cycle. This is especially important for household appliances, electric vehicles, LED panels.

Scientists from NUST MISIS, in collaboration with LG Electronics, have created new high-heat-conductivity magnesium alloys that differ from their counterparts in increased reliability and low cost, and in addition, they can significantly reduce the weight of devices.

"Traditionally, aluminum is used for heat removal, but it turns out to be too massive for modern gadgets. Reducing the weight of devices can significantly reduce energy consumption during operation, as well as reduce greenhouse emissions during transportation, which is becoming increasingly important today. The use of our alloys will reduce the weight of heat-removing elements by a third without losing effciency," said Vyacheslav Bazhenov, associate professor at the Department of Foundry Technology & Artistic Processing of Materials at NUST MISIS.

One of the problems in the operation of magnesium alloys, as noted by scientists, is their ability to catch fire in the air. Due to the addition of calcium and yttrium, scientists managed to significantly increase the ignition temperature, so that new materials can be used in various gadgets without restrictions.

"We wanted to create alloys with a low cost, so we were almost not using expensive elements, which are usually alloyed with magnesium -- neodymium, lanthanum, thorium etc. As a result, we had alloys of two compositions: the cheapest -- alloyed with silicon, zinc and calcium (Mg-Si-Zn-Ca) (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213956720300049) with high thermal conductivity and medium strength, and somewhat more expensive -- alloyed with zinc, yttrium and zirconium (Mg -- Zn -- Y -- Zr) (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213956721000128) with high strength and slightly lower thermal conductivity," said Vyacheslav Bazhenov.

Based on the results of the work, LG Electronics registered patents for a high-heat-conducting magnesium alloy (Mg-Si-Zn-Ca) developed at NUST MISIS and a radiator made of it in the USA, the European Union, Korea and China.

Currently, the research team is working on new compositions of magnesium-based alloys, which can provide high strength and corrosion resistance along with low cost and high thermal conduct

High Dose of vitamin D fails to improve condition of moderate to severe COVID-19 patients

A clinical trial was conducted with 240 patients who were given 200,000 IU of vitamin D3 on admission to hospital. The supplementation did not reduce length of stay or affect the proportion requiring intensive

FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE SUPPLEMENTATION OF VITAMIN D3 DID NOT REDUCE LENGTH OF STAY OR AFFECT THE PROPORTION REQUIRING INTENSIVE CARE. view more 

CREDIT: ROSA PEREIRA

By Karina Toledo | Agência FAPESP – Can a high dose of vitamin D administered on admission to hospital improve the condition of patients with moderate or severe COVID-19? The answer is no, according to a Brazilian study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The article reports a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, the kind of study considered the gold standard to evaluate drug efficacy. It was conducted with FAPESP’s support by researchers at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP), who recruited 240 patients treated at Hospital das Clínicas (HC), the hospital complex run by FM-USP, and the Ibirapuera field hospital in São Paulo City in June-August 2020.

“In vitro studies or trials with animals had previously shown that in certain situations vitamin D and its metabolites can have anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial effects, as well as modulating the immune response. We decided to investigate whether a high dose of the substance could have a protective effect in the context of an acute viral infection, reducing either the inflammation or the viral load,” Rosa Pereira, principal investigator for the project, told Agência FAPESP.

The volunteers were randomly divided into two groups, one of which was given vitamin D3 in a single dose of 200,000 units (IU) dissolved in a peanut oil solution. The other group was given only the peanut oil solution. All participants were treated according to the standard protocol for hospital treatment of the disease, which includes administration of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs.

The main purpose was to see if acute supplementation would affect the length of hospital stay for these patients, but the researchers also wanted to find out whether it would mitigate the risks of admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), intubation and death.

No significant difference between the groups was observed for any of these clinical outcomes. According to Pereira, the study was designed above all to assess the impact on hospital stay and a larger number of volunteers would be needed to achieve a scientifically acceptable estimate of the effect on mortality.

“So far we can say there’s no indication to administer vitamin D to patients who come to the hospital with severe COVID-19,” she said.

For Bruno Gualano, a researcher at FM-USP and penultimate author of the article, the findings show that at least for now there is no “silver bullet” for the treatment of COVID-19. “But that doesn’t mean continuous use of vitamin D can’t have beneficial effects of some kind,” he said.

Ideal dose

Pereira is currently leading a study at FM-USP to find out whether subjects with sufficient circulating levels of vitamin D combat infection by SARS-CoV-2 better than those with insufficient levels of the nutrient.

The ideal level of vitamin D in the blood and the daily supplementation dose vary according to age and overall health, she explained. Older people and patients with chronic diseases including osteoporosis should have more than 30 nanograms per milliliter of blood (ng/mL). For healthy adults, 20 ng/mL is an acceptable threshold.

“The ideal approach is case-by-case analysis, if necessary dosing the substance periodically by means of blood work, with supplementation if a deficiency is detected,” Pereira said.

The article “Effect of a single high dose of vitamin D3 on hospital length of stay in patients with moderate to severe COVID-19” can be read at: jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776738.

Critical understanding of why and how solid-state batteries

THE FARADAY INSTITUTION

Research News

 

Researchers from the Faraday Institution's SOLBAT project have made a significant step in understanding how and why solid-state batteries (SSBs) fail. A paper, published in Nature Materials on 22 April, provides answers to one important piece of the scientific puzzle.

To make step changes in electric vehicle (EV) battery range and safety at a lower cost, new battery chemistries that are "beyond lithium ion" must be developed. SSBs are one such promising technology, but mass market adoption has been held back by several key technical challenges that cause the battery to fail when charged and discharged.

SSBs can short circuit after repeating charging and discharging. One well-recognised cause of battery failure is the growth of dendrites, branching networks of lithium that grow through the solid electrolyte during charging of a battery. Solving these two challenges could potentially usher in a new era of SSB-powered electric vehicles.

Researchers in the Materials, Chemistry and Engineering Science Departments at the University of Oxford, collaborating with Diamond Light Source and the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland have generated strong evidence supporting one of two competing theories regarding the mechanism by which lithium metal dendrites grow through ceramic electrolytes leading to short circulates at high rates of charge.

Researchers used an imaging technique similar to that used in medical CAT scanners - X-ray computed tomography - coupled with spatially mapped X-ray diffraction, to visualise and characterise the growth of cracks and dendrites deep within an operating solid-state battery.

Conical pothole-like cracks first form in the electrolyte adjacent to the plated lithium anode. The crack propagates along a path where the porosity is above the average value of the ceramic. Metallic lithium is then deposited along the crack and this ingress drives the propagation of the cracks by widening the crack from the rear. The crack front propagates ahead of the lithium deposition, and lithium is not present at the crack tip. Only later, when lithium plates along the entire crack, does the cell finally short circuit.

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