Culture
When faced with danger, humans draw closer together. Social distancing thwarts this impulse. Professor Ophelia Deroy from Ludwigs-Maximilians Universitaet in Munich (LMU) and colleagues argue that this dilemma poses a greater threat to society than overtly antisocial behavior.
People who relied on conservative media or social media in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak were more likely to be misinformed about how to prevent the virus and believe conspiracy theories about it, a study of media use and public knowledge has found.
Based on an Annenberg Science Knowledge survey fielded in early March with over a thousand adults, the study was conducted by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Health practitioners are constantly developing new ways to help those with drug and alcohol addictions wean themselves from their substance of choice. Most such programs have limited success, however. A new study finds that interventions that take a multidimensional approach - tackling the biological, social, environmental and mental health obstacles to overcome while also addressing a person's substance use - work best for those hoping to stop using drugs.
Just a few weeks ago, everyone was talking about plummeting insect numbers. Academic discourse focused on three main causes: the destruction of habitats, pesticides in agriculture and the decline of food plants for insects. A team of researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL have now demonstrated for the first time that the diversity of food plants for insects in the canton of Zurich has dramatically decreased over the past 100 years or so.
When an actor is unable to perform in the theatre, an understudy--ideally one with some practice in the role--can take her place on stage. A study from Dr. Bernard Jasmin's laboratory at the University of Ottawa and published today in Nature Communications shows that the same is true of proteins. Its results point the way toward novel therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Agência FAPESP – Highly concentrated aqueous electrolytes, known as water-in-salt electrolytes, could be an alternative to the organic solvents used in car batteries and other electrochemical devices.
Suicide is now the second most common cause of death among American youth. Fatal suicides rose 30 percent between 2000 and 2016, and 2016 alone saw 1.3 million nonfatal suicide attempts. Now, a study led by Boston Children's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital demonstrates that a predictive computer model can identify patients at risk for attempting suicide from patterns in their electronic health records -- an average of two years ahead of time.
Using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, Marta Cerruti, an Associate Professor in McGill's Department of Materials Engineering, and her team analyzed damaged heart valves from patients who had undergone transplants.
Their findings, recently published in Acta Biomaterialia, show considerable differences in the mineral deposits found in aortic valves of men and women who suffer from stenosis, a life-threatening heart condition caused by a narrowing of the aortic valve opening.
A new study led by McGill University has found that tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface can show varying degrees of roughness and could help explain why certain earthquakes are stronger than others.
Earthquakes happen when the rocks beneath the Earth's surface break along geological fault lines and slide past each other. The properties of these faults - such as the roughness of their surface - can have an influence on the size of seismic events, however their study has been challenging because they are buried deep beneath the Earth's surface.
New research finds a connection between destructive white blood cells and a more severe disease course in patients with COVID-19.
"We found that patients with COVID-19 infection have higher blood levels of neutrophil extracellular traps, also called NETs, which are a product of an inflammatory type of neutrophil cell death called NETosis," says first author Yu (Ray) Zuo, M.D., a Michigan Medicine rheumatologist.
Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries below are not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.
Ventilator Triage Policies During the COVID-19 Pandemic at U.S. Hospitals Associated With Members of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- While most people will say they are extremely concerned with their online privacy, previous experiments have shown that, in practice, users readily divulge privacy information online.
In a study published in the latest Proceedings of Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2020), a team of Penn State researchers identified a dozen subtle -- but powerful -- reasons that may shed light on why people talk a good game about privacy, but fail to follow up in real life.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- People find it convenient to use Facebook or other social media accounts to sign up for most new apps and services, but they prefer to use their e-mail address or open a new account if they feel the information in the app is too sensitive, according to a team of researchers.
In a study, the researchers said participants were willing to use their Facebook ID to access relationship apps, such as class reunion and matchmaking apps, but balked at using the same feature for an app that arranges extramarital affairs.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Individuals who fear talking in front of a crowd could soon have a new tool to ease public speaking anxiety: their smart speaker.
A team of researchers at Penn State has developed a public-speaking tutor on the Amazon Alexa platform. The tutor enables users to engage in cognitive restructuring exercise - a psychological technique that helps anxious individuals recognize and modify negative thinking behaviors. When users deployed the tutor in a recent study, their pre-speech anxiety was relieved, according to the researchers.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Giving users of smart assistants the option to adjust settings for privacy or content delivery, or both, doesn't necessarily increase their trust in the platform, according to a team of Penn State researchers. In fact, for some users, it could have an unfavorable effect.