| RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS |


“The Wiedemann–Franz law is one of the


major factors that limits the thermoelectric efficiency of conductors,” says Zhou. “The violation of the law may provide an alter- native route to achieving high-efficiency thermoelectric materials.”


The calculations suggest that stanene’s


thermal transport properties could be tuned by altering its chemical potential, he adds, for example by adding traces of other atoms. The team now hopes to calculate how efficiently stanene can generate thermo-


electric power, and the size of the voltage generated by a temperature difference in the material.


1. Zhou, H., Cai, Y., Zhang, G. & Zhang, Y-W. Quantum thermal transport in stanene. Physical Review B 94, 045423 (2016).


Chikungunya


CHILDREN SHRUG OFF DISEASE SYMPTOMS WHILE STILL INFECTIOUS


Children recover from chikungunya viral infection more quickly than adults, which could make them hidden carriers of the disease, finds a team of immunologists and pediatricians in Singapore and Malaysia1. Unlike adults, who typically stay indoors


while the virus is active, children feel less wretched and continue to play outdoors, exposing themselves to mosquitoes. “Some kids


still carry the virus in their blood even when they don’t feel sick anymore, which is scary,” says Lisa F. P. Ng, who led the study at the A*STAR Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN). “It is important to clinically manage children from serving as reservoirs of infection.” Chikungunya is a painful viral disease trans-


mitted via mosquitoes that also carry dengue and the Zika virus. Identified in Tanzania in 1953,


Children infected with the chikungunya virus could infect mosquitoes that spread the disease.


18 A*STAR RESEARCH


MILD SYMPTOMS COULD MEAN THAT


CHILDREN ARE BRINGING THE MOSQUITO- BORNE DISEASE TO THE PLAYGROUND


the virus has since spread worldwide. There are no specific antiviral treatments for chikungunya and vaccines are stalled in preclinical trials. Infected adults typically suffer from fever,


rashes and debilitating joint pain that can persist for months to years. But clinicians at Sarawak General Hospital in Malaysia, led by Ooi Mong How, noticed that children did not suffer as much. They approached Ng and her team to explore the immunological basis for the chills and aches. The team studied blood samples from 86


chikungunya-infected children aged 1 week to 11 years, who visited the hospital between 2009 and 2010. They compared these samples with those of 64 infected adults in Singapore. The children expressed higher levels of small proteins known as cytokines, which communicate information between immune cells. “They have a very active immune response at an early stage, and then it clears off fairly quickly,” explains Ng. The spiked cytokine activity could explain the children’s improved clinical outcomes. The children’s results revealed a more com- plex picture. More than half still had the virus


ISSUE 6 | JANUARY – MARCH 2017


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