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No more nose swabs? Why a saliva test for COVID-19 could be a 'game changer' – CBC.ca

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Instead of having an extra-long swab pushed way up your nose, you could soon just spit into a cup to get tested for COVID-19. 

SalivaDirect, a cheap, saliva-based test for the disease developed by researchers at Yale University, received emergency authorization for use from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this week. The test was developed with the help of funding from the NBA, National Basketball Players Association and a grant from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Rather than being commercialized and licensed to particular companies, it’s being released as an “open source” protocol — a recipe that’s freely available for other labs to follow using a variety of commercially available ingredients and equipment. 

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Unfortunately, the test isn’t yet available in Canada. But here’s why the new test and similar tests under development could be a big step forward in keeping the pandemic under control.

The team says the new saliva-based test is ‘simpler and less invasive’ than traditional nasopharyngeal swab tests for COVID-19. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

How the SalivaDirect test works

The test detects genetic material or RNA from SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, using equipment in a lab.

In that way, it’s very similar to the nose swab tests that have been the standard for detecting COVID-19 up until now. Because that analysis has to be done in a lab, the results aren’t instantaneous — like the traditional test, they’ll take about a day to come back.

But the new test has two main differences:

  • The RNA is collected from saliva, not a nose swab.
  • It skips a step required in standard tests called “nucleic acid extraction,” which separates RNA from the sample and requires special chemical ingredients. Instead, it uses a widely available enzyme and heat.

Lab tests comparing SalivaDirect to a traditional nasal swab test found it was only slightly less sensitive, and both types of tests got the same result more than 90 per cent of the time.

Swab samples are tested for coronavirus RNA at a hospital in Liege, Belgium. SalivaDirect also tests for RNA, so analysis in the new saliva-based test must also be done in a lab. (Francisco Seco/The Associated Press)

Main advantages

Even people who haven’t had the test probably aren’t enticed by images or video of the nose swabbing procedure.

“We can all agree that it’s not a pleasant experience,” said Anne Wyllie, associate research scientist at the Yale School of Public Health, part of the team that developed the new test.

The team calls the test “simpler and less invasive” than traditional nasopharyngeal swab tests for COVID-19.

But its advantages go beyond comfort.

In an FDA news release, Admiral Brett G. Giroir, assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its COVID-19 testing co-ordinator, called the new test a “testing innovation game changer that will reduce the demand for scarce testing resources.”

That’s because:

  • The sample can be collected in any sterile container and requires neither nose swabs, which are sometimes in short supply, nor chemicals called nucleic acid preservatives.
  • Skipping the nucleic acid extraction step eliminates the need for the chemical kits and reagents, which are also sometimes in short supply. It also reduces the processing time.
  • The sample can be collected by the patient him or herself under supervision of a health-care worker. That could potentially lower the risk to health-care workers, who currently have to do the nose swabbing on patients.
  • It has already been tested and shown to work with reagents and instruments from different companies. “This flexibility enables continued testing if some vendors encounter supply chain issues, as experienced early in the pandemic,” Yale University said in a news release.
  • That also makes it cheaper than traditional COVID-19 testing, in addition to being simpler and less invasive. Wyllie estimates the chemical ingredients needed for the test cost less than $4 US ($5.30 Cdn), and she thinks labs could do it for roughly $10 a sample.

One U.S. company, DiaCarta, has already submitted its COVID-19 saliva test to Health Canada for review. Health Canada says it hasn’t been accepted yet, but the department is working ‘as quickly as possible.’ (CBC News)

Limited testing, availability so far

So far, the test has only undergone limited testing in the lab and results have only been published online, prior to peer review, on a few dozen known positive and negative samples.

“It’s really with a small, fairly controlled sample,” said Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and Sinai Health System, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We don’t know how the test will perform in the real world.”

However, based on that preliminary data, he called the performance “pretty good.”

Spitting in a cup may soon be an alternative to the standard COVID-19 test that goes up through the nose, but saliva tests haven’t yet been approved for use in Canada. 2:00

SalivaDirect is currently being tested on the field in partnership with the National Basketball Association and the National Basketball Players Association. Part of the goal is to find out:

  • If it’s effective for detecting asymptomatic or presymptomatic cases.
  • If cases can be detected in “pooled” samples where samples from many individuals are combined for testing at the same time, to see if cases are popping up, for example, on a team or in a workplace.

The test will be offered first at the Yale Pathology Laboratory and at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Conn.

It has not yet been authorized for use in Canada. But Morris says in general, once tests are approved by Health Canada, provinces have been able to scale up pretty rapidly.

Morris notes that SalivaDirect isn’t the first saliva test for COVID-19 authorized in the U.S. — the FDA says it’s the fifth: “It just appears that this one is easier and doesn’t require the [extraction] reagents.”

A similar test from Rutgers Clinical Genomics Laboratory and Spectrum Solutions is being used by Major League Baseball.

One U.S. company, DiaCarta, has already submitted its COVID-19 saliva test to Health Canada for review. Health Canada says it hasn’t been accepted yet, but the department is working “as quickly as possible.”

Norm Powell, left, of the Toronto Raptors steals the ball from Garrett Temple of the Brooklyn Nets in Game 2 of an NBA playoff series, Wednesday. The saliva-based test was developed with funding from the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association. (Kevin C. Cox/Pool Photo/AP)

Potential applications: Schools, workplaces

However, Morris thinks it could lead to wider testing.

“It’s been difficult to get people to go to assessment centres,” he said. “If they’re able to provide a spit sample, it will make it a lot easier for public health officials to get samples from people we need to get it from.”

He thinks it has a lot of promise for large populations such as school, college or university students and large workplaces.

Future of saliva tests

Wyllie hopes the saliva test will also be a stepping stone toward faster tests and at-home tests.

Those would be similar to at-home pregnancy tests that provide results within minutes, allowing people to test daily before work or school.

Some such tests are already under development. In Canada, there are teams working on development at the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Regina and Ontario’s Western University; Kelowna, B.C.-based Metabolic Insights; and Victoria-based ImmunoPrecise Antibodies in collaboration with the University of Victoria.

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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