Science

Fever Feels Horrible, but is Actually Awesome!

I understand the purpose of appeals and that we rarely hear about things that are not appealed. But I don't think either the FDA or court system are functioning when people and companies go in front of a decision-making body knowing they're going to lose and viewing the ruling as the real starting gun.

In our latest study we found that samples taken from mothers and newborn babies younger than one week in Nigeria already had colistin-resistant bacteria present in their bodies. But neither the babies nor their mothers had been treated with colistin.

Colistin is one of the last remaining antibiotics that is still effective in killing bacteria and fighting infections such as pneumonia. It is deemed critically important for human medicine by the World Health Organization.

We surmise that mothers may have picked up these colistin resistant bacteria from the environment. We cannot speculate on the specific mechanism. The babies, meanwhile, could have picked up the bacteria from the hospital, the community, or from their mothers. It’s not yet known if these colistin-resistant bacteria stay in the mothers or babies – but if they do this may increase their chances of acquiring future drug-resistant infections.

Unions are joining the Biden administration’s campaign to promote scientific integrity and protect scientists from political interference

Earlier this month, the union representing thousands of scientists and engineers at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed a new contract that includes protections for government workers who stand up for scientific integrity. A similar provision was included in a union contract at the US Department of Agriculture last year, and negotiators for the union representing more than 5,000 early-career scientists at the National Institutes of Health are following suit. A contract could be signed in the next several months.

These collective bargaining agreements are the latest front in an ongoing effort to shield US science agencies from political interference. The administration of US President Joe Biden, who this week bowed out of the race for November’s presidential election, has already crafted legal protections for government scientists and other workers. It is now rushing to finalize scientific-integrity policies at dozens of federal agencies.

Political meddling in science has long been a bipartisan affair, but the current movement is fuelled by fears that former president Donald Trump will regain the office. Trump’s first term as president proved disastrous for scientists at the EPA and other science agencies, and many fear that a second term would be even worse.

If Trump wins November’s election, the next question is what will happen with the US Congress. If Republicans were to retain control over the House of Representatives and seize control of the Senate, Trump would have at least two years of free rein to reshape the government to his liking.

“People should not be confident that we have the legal tools to effectively respond to abuses of power in a second Trump administration,” says Blake Emerson, an administrative-law researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In a groundbreaking experiment, Japanese researchers transferred regenerative genes to fruit flies, leading to improved intestinal health and enhanced stem cell activity. This discovery opens new possibilities for anti-aging strategies in higher organisms, including humans, through targeted gene therapy.

ghost archive | Excerpts:

... findings with null or negative results — those that fail to find a relationship between variables or groups, or that go against the preconceived hypothesis — gather dust in favour of studies with positive or significant findings. A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% were able to do so2. Over time, this bias in publications distorts the scientific record, and a focus on significant results can encourage researchers to selectively report their data or exaggerate the statistical importance of their findings. It also wastes time and money, because researchers might duplicate studies that had already been conducted but not published. Some evidence suggests that the problem is getting worse, with fewer negative results seeing the light of day3 over time.

At the crux of both academic misconduct and publication bias is the same ‘publish or perish’ culture, perpetuated by academic institutions, research funders, scholarly journals and scientists themselves, that rewards researchers when they publish findings in prestigious venues, Scheel says.

But these academic gatekeepers have biases, say some critics, who argue that funders and top-tier journals often crave novelty and attention-grabbing findings. Journal editors worry that pages full of null results will attract fewer readers, says Simine Vazire, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and editor of the journal Psychological Science.

One of the most significant changes to come out of the replication crisis is the expansion of preregistration (see ‘Registrations on the rise’), in which researchers must state their hypothesis and the outcomes they intend to measure in a public database at the outset of their study (this is already the norm in clinical trials). ... Preliminary data look promising: when Scheel and her colleagues compared the results of 71 registered reports with a random sample of 152 standard psychology manuscripts, they found that 44% of the registered reports had positive results, compared with 96% of the standard publications^7^ (see ‘Intent to publish’). And Nosek and his colleagues found that reviewers scored psychology and neuroscience registered reports higher on metrics of research rigour and quality compared with papers published under the standard model^8^.

A 98-year-old pioneering physicist who gave up her PhD 75 years ago to have a family has received an honorary doctorate from her old university.

In 1948, Rosemary Fowler's findings at the University of Bristol paved the way for critical discoveries that would rewrite the laws of physics.

Her discovery of the Kaon particle helped lead to a revolution in the theory of particle physics. But in a post-war Britain, she decided to leave academia when she married fellow physicist Peter Fowler in 1949 and went on to have three children.

Dr Fowler said she felt "very honoured", but added: "I haven't done anything since to deserve special respect."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24292479

Abstract:

Although hundreds of dialogue programs geared towards conflict resolution are offered every year, there have been few scientific studies of their effectiveness.

Across 2 studies we examined the effect of controlled, dyadic interactions on attitudes towards the ‘other’ in members of groups involved in ideological conflict. Study 1 involved Mexican immigrants and White Americans in Arizona, and Study 2 involved Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Cross-group dyads interacted via video and text in a brief, structured, face-to-face exchange: one person was assigned to write about the difficulties of life in their society (‘perspective-giving’), and the second person was assigned to accurately summarize the statement of the first person (‘perspective-taking’).

Positive changes in attitudes towards the outgroup were greater for Mexican immigrants and Palestinians after perspective-giving and for White Americans and Israelis after perspective-taking. For Palestinians, perspective-giving to an Israeli effectively changed attitudes towards Israelis, while a control condition in which they wrote an essay on the same topic without interacting had no effect on attitudes, illustrating the critical role of being heard.

Thus, the effects of dialogue for conflict resolution depend on an interaction between dialogue condition and participants' group membership, which may reflect power asymmetries.

study and abstract:

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials. In animal models, psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus. It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics. Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional mapping (roughly 18 magnetic resonance imaging visits per participant). Healthy adults were tracked before, during and for 3 weeks after high-dose psilocybin (25 mg) and methylphenidate (40 mg), and brought back for an additional psilocybin dose 6–12 months later. Psilocybin massively disrupted functional connectivity (FC) in cortex and subcortex, acutely causing more than threefold greater change than methylphenidate. These FC changes were driven by brain desynchronization across spatial scales (areal, global), which dissolved network distinctions by reducing correlations within and anticorrelations between networks. Psilocybin-driven FC changes were strongest in the default mode network, which is connected to the anterior hippocampus and is thought to create our sense of space, time and self. Individual differences in FC changes were strongly linked to the subjective psychedelic experience. Performing a perceptual task reduced psilocybin-driven FC changes. Psilocybin caused persistent decrease in FC between the anterior hippocampus and default mode network, lasting for weeks. Persistent reduction of hippocampal-default mode network connectivity may represent a neuroanatomical and mechanistic correlate of the proplasticity and therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work.

But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology articleby our team of academic sleuths – which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician – has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.

Here is the study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310 (archived)

Spanish paleoanthropologists from the University of Alcala discovered that Neanderthals exhibited social behaviors such as compassion for seriously ill children. The research was published in the scientific journal magazine Science Advances (SciAdv).

The conclusions of scientists are based on the analysis of fossilized remains of a small group of representatives of this species, related to humans, who lived between 273 thousand and 146 thousand years ago in the Cova Negra cave in the province of Valencia, on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.

Researchers discovered the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man who was about six years old when he died. Although researchers were not sure what the child’s gender was, she was named Tina.

As the analysis showed, Tina suffered from a severe inner ear pathology from birth, which caused complete deafness, attacks of severe dizziness and the inability to maintain balance. It was clear that he could not survive in the prehistoric world without the constant care of his adult relatives.

Scientists noted that Tina’s survival to the age of six indicates that her team provided the necessary care for the child and her mother throughout this period.

According to anthropologists, this discovery proves that Neanderthals felt compassion and did not act solely for pragmatic reasons.

“For decades, Neanderthals have been known to care for and protect their vulnerable companions. However, all known cases of grooming involved adults, leading some scientists to believe that such behavior is not true altruism but merely an exchange of mutual aid between equals,” said lead study author Mercedes Conde-Valverde.

Scientists also noted that Tina’s discovery represents the earliest known case of Down syndrome, as their pathology only occurs in people with the condition.

Previous researchers discovered The link between Neanderthal genes and autism.