Pilot results from San Bernardino County, California, where crime is prevalent and distrust in government high, found that religion may be key to COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Focused education efforts and an on-site mobile clinic in Black church parking lots resulted in the vaccinations of 417 people, 84% of whom were Black.

Results also showed an increase in Black attendance of mass vaccination clinics to 3.6% of total patients, up from 3%, in the week following asking Black churches and clergy to help in COVID-19 vaccination education and distribution.

What sets human communication apart from lower animals is its compositionality, which means that units of meaning can be combined and new meanings can be constructed. The words "blue" and "car" have their own meanings but combined there is a new content, i.e., a car that is blue.

Just a few short years ago, CRISPR-Cas9 technology took the world of molecular biology by storm because it allowed a cost-effective way to shut off or turn on traits in organisms without any side effects.

CRISPR is an acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a bacterial defense system. The enzyme Cas9 acts like a pair of ‘molecular scissors’ that can cut two strands of DNA and insert of remove something. Then CRISPR repairs it.

Now it's gotten upgrade. Instead of one or two genes, a new study knocked out 12 at once.

Even previously considerate and helpful male managers have become less likely to mentor female employees, according to a new study. They've become less likely to even talk one-on-one with women.

This unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement could deny female employees critical development and thus career advancement. Women are not the problem, a large portion of female employees report a willingness to be mentored by an older male co-worker, but career advancement also has a social component, and in the last few years men are less likely to work one-on-one in an office with the door closed and less likely to engage in social behavior, like a post-work dinner with female employees.

Having a single primary care physician is statistically correlated to increased treatment adherence and decreased hospital admissions and mortality risk. A new paper finds it may also lead to costly unnecessary tests.

Male patients who have a single general physician were more likely to receive a prostate cancer screening test during a period when the test was not recommended by the US Preventive Services Task Force. Greedy doctors? No, the tests don't pay enough money to be meaningful, it is that doctors invariably prefer to side with patients over insurance companies or government protocols.

Whatever Uncanny Valley when it comes to machines still existed in 2019 got a lot smaller in 2020. We're even being nicer to them since 2020.

People mostly dispense with social norms of human interaction and treat machines differently. The behavior holds true even as machines became more "human" seeming, such as Amazon's Alexa or Morgan Freeman in your vehicle navigation system.

Human default behavior is often driven by heuristic thinking -- the snap judgments people use to navigate complex daily interactions. The Uncanny Valley says that as artificial things begin to seem more human, but not close enough to pass for human, we are put off. 

That all changed due to COVID-19. We got nicer toward our machine and other people.