War medicine: “the front line is 100 kilometers away then three hours later, it is in front of your hospital”
- Professor Raphaël Pitti shows in an interview the complexity of training caregivers in war medicine in Ukraine because of restrictions.
- The training of war medicine is based on the idea of saving as many people as possible by sorting the sick, also called “damage control”.
- War medicine has evolved in the knowledge of the physiological processes leading to the death of stabilized wounded, due to hypothermia or hypotension.
Covid-19: the numbers of cases and deaths would be largely underestimated in Africa
- A WHO analysis in Africa shows that there would have been 100 times more cases of Covid-19 and 10 times more deaths than official figures for the African continent.
- This underestimation would be linked to a greater proportion of asymptomatic cases but also because of difficult access to tests and care.
- These figures highlight Africa’s difficulties in dealing with Covid-19: only 18% of people on the continent are so far fully vaccinated.
When the study of myths makes it possible to go back to the origins of the dog and its ways of diffusion
- In a journal article AnthropozoologicaJulien d’Huy studies mythical stories to retrace the history of the domestication of dogs using phylogenetic tools.
- He cuts the stories according to their similarities. This information is then processed by algorithms to build phylogenetic trees.
- According to this approach, the dogs would have appeared in Asia, passed on the side of Eurasia and America, to finally reach Africa and Australia.
With Comet Interceptor, Europe goes on the hunt for comets
- ESA’s Comet Interceptor, announced in 2019 and launched in 2029, will aim to study a comet that comes from the Oort cloud, on the edge of our stellar system.
- It will be composed of 3 probes united in a vessel. They will wait 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
- Each of the probes will be equipped with different instruments to observe the comet and obtain a 3D view of the object.
Bromide ion, new hope for autism spectrum disorders
- A study published in Neuropsychopharmacology tested bromide ions on mice with ASD which showed improved social behavior and decreased stereotyped behavior.
- It would be necessary to combine the bromide ions with a molecule which facilitates the activity of the neuronal receptors because there is little interval between the effective dose and the threshold of toxicity of the bromide ions.
- The researchers now want to start clinical trials on a small group of adults.
