Mining and Validating Social Media Data for COVID-19-Related Human Behaviors Between January and July 2020: Infodemiology Study.

BACKGROUND: Health authorities can minimize the impact of an emergent infectious disease outbreak through effective and timely risk communication, which can build trust and adherence to subsequent behavioral messaging. Monitoring the psychological impacts of an outbreak, as well as public adherence to such messaging, is also important for minimizing long-term effects of an outbreak. OBJECTIVE: We used social media data from Twitter to identify human behaviors relevant to COVID-19 transmission, as well as the perceived impacts of COVID-19 on individuals, as a first step toward real-time monitoring of public perceptions to inform public health communications. METHODS: We developed a coding schema for 6 categories and 11 subcategories, which included both a wide number of behaviors as well codes focused on the impacts of the pandemic (eg, economic and mental health impacts). We used this to develop training data and develop supervised learning classifiers for classes with sufficient labels. Classifiers that performed adequately were applied to our remaining corpus, and temporal and geospatial trends were assessed. We compared the classified patterns to ground truth mobility data and actual COVID-19 confirmed cases to assess the signal achieved here. RESULTS: We applied our labeling schema to approximately 7200 tweets. The worst-performing classifiers had F1 scores of only 0.18 to 0.28 when trying to identify tweets about monitoring symptoms and testing. Classifiers about social distancing, however, were much stronger, with F1 scores of 0.64 to 0.66. We applied the social distancing classifiers to over 228 million tweets. We showed temporal patterns consistent with real-world events, and we showed correlations of up to -0.5 between social distancing signals on Twitter and ground truth mobility throughout the United States. CONCLUSIONS: Behaviors discussed on Twitter are exceptionally varied. Twitter can provide useful information for parameterizing models that incorporate human behavior, as well as for informing public health communication strategies by describing awareness of and compliance with suggested behaviors.

Macrophage-Mimicking Cellular Nanoparticles Scavenge Proinflammatory Cytokines in Specimens of Patients with Inflammatory Disorders.

Effectively neutralizing inflammatory cytokines is crucial for managing a variety of inflammatory disorders. Current techniques that target only a subset of cytokines often fall short due to the intricate nature of redundant and compensatory cytokine networks. A promising solution to this challenge is using cell membrane-coated nanoparticles (CNPs). These nanoparticles replicate the complex interactions between cells and cytokines observed in disease pathology, providing a potential avenue for multiplex cytokine scavenging. While the development of CNPs using experimental animal models has shown great promise, their effectiveness in scavenging multiple cytokines in human diseases has yet to be demonstrated. To bridge this gap, this study selected macrophage membrane-coated CNPs (MФ-CNPs) and assessed their ability to scavenge inflammatory cytokines in serum samples from patients with COVID-19, sepsis, acute pancreatitis, or type-1 diabetes, along with synovial fluid samples from patients with rheumatoid arthritis. The results show that MФ-CNPs effectively scavenge critical inflammatory cytokines, including interleukin (IL)-6, IL-8, interferon (IFN)-γ, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, in a dose-dependent manner. Overall, this study demonstrates MФ-CNPs as a multiplex cytokine scavenging formulation with promising applications in clinical settings to treat a range of inflammatory disorders.

Glycan-modified cellular nanosponges for enhanced neutralization of botulinum toxin.

Botulinum toxin (BoNT) is a potent neurotoxin that poses a significant threat as a biowarfare weapon and a potential bioterrorist tool. Currently, there is a lack of effective countermeasures to combat BoNT intoxication in the event of a biological attack. Here, we report on a novel solution by combining cell metabolic engineering with cell membrane coating nanotechnology, resulting in the development of glycan-modified cellular nanosponges that serve as a biomimetic and broad-spectrum BoNT detoxification strategy. Specifically, we increase the expression levels of gangliosides on THP-1 cells through metabolic engineering, and then collect the modified THP-1 cell membrane and coat it onto synthetic polymeric cores, creating cellular nanosponges that closely mimic host cells. Our findings demonstrate that higher levels of gangliosides on the cellular nanosponges result in greater binding capacities with BoNT. The glycan-modified cellular nanosponges exhibit superior efficacy in neutralizing BoNT cytotoxicity in vitro when compared to their unmodified counterparts. In a mouse model of BoNT intoxication, the glycan-modified cellular nanosponges show more pronounced survival benefits when administered both as a treatment and a preventative regimen. These results highlight the potential of cellular nanosponges, especially when modified with glycans, as a promising countermeasure platform against BoNT and related clostridial toxins.

Anthropogenic uranium signatures in turtles, tortoises, and sea turtles from nuclear sites.

Chelonians (turtles, tortoises, and sea turtles) grow scute keratin in sequential layers over time. Once formed, scute keratin acts as an inert reservoir of environmental information. For chelonians inhabiting areas with legacy or modern nuclear activities, their scute has the potential to act as a time-stamped record of radionuclide contamination in the environment. Here, we measure bulk (i.e. homogenized scute) and sequential samples of chelonian scute from the Republic of the Marshall Islands and throughout the United States of America, including at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, southwestern Utah, the Savannah River Site, and the Oak Ridge Reservation. We identify legacy uranium (235U and 236U) contamination in bulk and sequential chelonian scute that matches known nuclear histories at these locations during the 20th century. Our results confirm that chelonians bioaccumulate uranium radionuclides and do so sequentially over time. This technique provides both a time series approach for reconstructing nuclear histories from significant past and present contexts throughout the world and the ability to use chelonians for long-term environmental monitoring programs (e.g. sea turtles at Enewetok and Bikini Atolls in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and in Japan near the Fukushima Daiichi reactors).