Enlarge / The BPClip in action. (credit: Yinan Xuan et al.)

Given that 47 percent of adults in the US alone have hypertension, keeping on top of your blood pressure readings is a smart thing to do. And doing so could become much more convenient, requiring nothing more than your phone and an $0.80 piece of plastic, thanks to new research from the University of California, San Diego.

The school's device, called BPClip, gives broadly comparable readings to those taken with a traditional cuff but functions as a simple cell phone attachment. It relies on the flashlight and the smartphone’s camera—along with some simple physics.

BPClip consists of a plastic clip with a spring mechanism that lets the user squeeze the device and two light channels: one to direct a flashlight to your finger and the other to direct the reflected light to the camera for image processing. A custom-made Android app handles the data processing and guides users through the measurement.

Enlarge / On May 22, John Timmer (left) moderated a panel featuring Karin Bok (center) and Nathaniel Wang (right) for the Ars Frontiers 2023 session titled, "Beyond COVID: What Does mRNA Technology Mean for Disease Treatment?" (credit: Ars Technica)

The world of biomedicine has developed a lot of technology that seems a small step removed from science fiction, but the public isn't aware of much of it. mRNA-based vaccines, though, were a big exception as a lot of the public tracked the technology's development as a key step toward emerging from the worst of the pandemic and then received the vaccines in droves.

mRNA technology has a lot of potential applications beyond COVID, and we talked a bit about those during the "Beyond COVID: What Does mRNA Technology Mean for Disease Treatment?" panel at last week's Ars Frontiers event. We've archived the panel on YouTube; if you want to focus on the discussion about mRNA therapies, you can start at the 1-hour, 55-minute mark .

mRNA is a nucleic acid molecule that instructs the cell to make specific proteins. When used as vaccines, the instructions call for a protein produced by a pathogen, such as a virus. "It helps put up a wanted poster for the immune system," was how Nathaniel Wang, co-founder and CEO of Replicate Bioscience put it.

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In December 2022, founder Elon Musk gave an update on his other, other company, the brain implant startup Neuralink. As early as 2020, the company had been saying it was close to starting clinical trials of the implants, but the December update suggested those were still six months away. This time, it seems that the company was correct, as it now claims that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given its approval for the start of human testing.

Neuralink is not ready to start recruiting test subjects, and there are no details about what the trials will entail. Searching the ClinicalTrials.gov database for "Neuralink" also turns up nothing. Typically, the initial trials are small and focused entirely on safety rather than effectiveness. Given that Neuralink is developing both brain implants and a surgical robot to do the implanting, there will be a lot that needs testing.

It's likely that these will focus on the implants first, given that other implants have already been tested in humans, whereas an equivalent surgical robot has not.

Enlarge (credit: Wladimir Bulgar via Getty Images )

On December 18, 2019, Wuhan Central Hospital admitted a patient with symptoms common for the winter flu season: a 65-year-old man with fever and pneumonia. Ai Fen, director of the emergency department, oversaw a typical treatment plan, including antibiotics and anti-influenza drugs.

Six days later, the patient was still sick, and Ai was puzzled, according to news reports and a detailed reconstruction of this period by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey. The respiratory department decided to try to identify the guilty pathogen by reading its genetic code, a process called sequencing. They rinsed part of the patient’s lungs with saline, collected the liquid, and sent the sample to a biotech company. On December 27 , the hospital got the results : The man had contracted a new coronavirus closely related to the one that caused the SARS outbreak that began 17 years before.

The original SARS virus was sequenced five months after the first cases were recorded. This type of traditional sequencing reads the full genetic code, or genome, of just one organism at a time, which first needs to be carefully isolated from a sample. The researchers hired by Wuhan Central Hospital were able to map the new virus so quickly using a more demanding technique called metagenomic sequencing, which reads the genomes of every organism in a sample at once — without such time-intensive preparation. If the traditional approach is like locating a single book on a shelf and copying it, metagenomic sequencing is like grabbing all of the books off the shelf and scanning them all at once.

Enlarge / The Comirnaty (Pfizer/BioNTech) and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. (credit: Getty | Marcos del Mazo )

Two Republican lawmakers in Idaho have introduced a bill that would make it a misdemeanor for anyone in the state to administer mRNA-based vaccines—namely the lifesaving and remarkably safe COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. If passed as written, it would also preemptively ban the use of countless other mRNA vaccines that are now in development, such as shots for RSV , a variety of cancers, HIV, flu, Nipah virus, and cystic fibrosis, among others.

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Tammy Nichols of Middleton and Rep. Judy Boyle of Midvale, both staunch conservatives who say that stand for freedom and the right to life. But their bill, HB 154 , proposes that "a person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid [mRNA] technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state." If passed into law, anyone administering lifesaving mRNA-based vaccines would be guilty of a misdemeanor, which could result in jail time and/or a fine.

While presenting the bill to the House Health & Welfare Committee last week, Nichols said their anti-mRNA stance stems from the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines were initially allowed under emergency use authorizations (EUAs) from the Food and Drug Administrations, not the agency's full regulatory approval. "We have issues that this was fast-tracked," she told fellow lawmakers, according to reporting from local news outlet KXLY.com .

Enlarge / Those lab coats aren't going to protect you from your own biases. (credit: Caiaimage/Robert Daly )

It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide.

And it's not just the general public having issues. We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.

Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgements even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.

Enlarge / Chicken eggs are disposed of at a quarantined farm in Israel's northern Moshav (village) of Margaliot on January 3, 2022. (credit: Getty | JALAA MAREY / AFP) )

The ongoing bird flu outbreak in the US is now the longest and deadliest on record. More than 57 million birds have been killed by the virus or culled since a year ago, and the deadly disruption has helped propel skyrocketing egg prices and a spike in egg smuggling.

Since highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) was first detected in US birds in January 2022, the price of a carton of a dozen eggs has shot up from an average of about $1.79 in December 2021 to $4.25 in December 2022, a 137 percent increase, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics . Although inflation and supply chain issues partly explain the rise, eggs saw the largest percentage increase of any specific food, according to the consumer price index .

And the steep pricing is leading some at the US-Mexico border to try to smuggle in illegal cartons, which is prohibited. A US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told NPR this week that people in El Paso, Texas, are buying eggs in Juárez, Mexico, because they are " significantly less expensive ." Meanwhile, a customs official in San Diego tweeted a reminder amid a rise in egg interceptions that failure to declare such agriculture items at a port of entry can result in penalties up to $10,000 .

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, which causes gonorrhea. (credit: NIAID )

The most highly drug-resistant cases of gonorrhea detected in the US to date appeared in two unrelated people in Massachusetts, state health officials announced Thursday.

The cases mark the first time that US isolates of the gonorrhea-causing bacterium, Neisseria gonorrhoeae , have shown complete resistance or reduced susceptibility to all drugs that are recommended for treatment.

Fortunately, both cases were successfully cured with potent injections of the antibiotic ceftriaxone, despite the bacterial isolates demonstrating reduced susceptibility to the drug. Ceftriaxone is currently the frontline recommended treatment for the sexually transmitted infection.

Enlarge (credit: Luis Alvarez )

COVID vaccines remain the safest way to reduce the chance that SARS-CoV-2 can put you in the hospital and are therefore a critical component of the public health campaign against the pandemic. Yet, in the US, there has been lots of controversy and outright anger about attempts to expand the use of vaccines, and a substantial portion of the population appears to be avoiding the shots for political reasons .

The extreme polarization of the US' politics hasn't gone away, and the controversy seems to be fresh in some politicians' minds , so it's easy to expect that the vaccine hesitancy isn't going away. But an international survey on COVID vaccine attitudes suggests that the US has seen a large boost in COVID vaccine acceptance and now has attitudes similar to other westernized democracies. Elsewhere in the world, the survey reveals clear regional patterns in vaccine acceptance, although there are oddities everywhere.

Becoming typical

The survey started out back in 2020 as a series of questions about whether people intended to get vaccines once they became available. In the intervening years, the people performing the survey have added several nations (it's now up to a total of 23) and shifted the questions to account for the availability of vaccines, addition of boosters, and development of treatments for COVID-19. In all 23 countries, the survey involved a pool of 1,000 participants who were generally reflective of the country's population.