News Articles

Projects and welfare systems established to provide support by normalizing disabled people instead contribute to their further marginalization, finds a new analysis.The paper in Organization Studies investigated a program that allocated computers to disabled people, to help people improve sociability through electronic interactions.

In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt set sail on a 5-year, 8000-km voyage through Latin America. His journey through the Andes Mountains, captured by his famous vegetation zonation figure featuring Mount Chimborazo, canonized the place of mountains in understanding Earth's biodiversity.  One puzzle for scientists since von Humboldt 250 years ago, and certainly later with Darwin, Wallace, and Mendel, was global pattern of mountain biodiversity, and the extraordinarily high richness in tropical mountains in particular. Two new papers focus on the fact that the high level of biodiversity found on mountains is far beyond what would be expected from prevailing hypotheses.

A team of ecologists exposed Zonotrichia leucophrys (white-crowned sparrows) to the seed treatment known as imidacloprid (in the class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids) and say the measured weight mass declined in just a few hours, which led to the birds delaying migration. But their study was so small it can only be considered exploratory.Neonicotinoids are seed treatments, they were created to reduce broad spectrum spraying, like the dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) that Nixon appointee William Ruckelshaus banned domestically over the findings of experts in 1972.  But this new paper claims the replacements for broad spraying may be just as harmful. 

A recent paper has linked two types of heart problems and one of the most commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics.Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's adverse reporting system plus a private insurance health claims database in the U.S. that captures demographics, drug identification, dose prescribed and treatment duration, identified 12,505 cases of valvular regurgitation with 125,020 case-control subjects in a random sample of more than nine million patients.

One of biology's most fundamental sets of building blocks may have special properties that helped bootstrap itself into its modern form - or it may be "cui bono?" thinking where people find an event, find a fact, and assume the fact caused the event, like we get in endocrine disruption and too much modern epidemiology.

Hemophilia, a rare inherited bleeding disorder in which blood doesn't clot normally - meaning any cut can be deadly - is a lot less rare than previously estimated. A new paper states that as many as 1,125,000 men around the world have it, 418,000 with a severe version of the mostly undiagnosed disease, which is 3X greater than the 400,000 people previously estimated.

Though bees can live for years, their mating period is brief so male honeybees use a bee version of Flunitrazepam (Rohypnol - colloquially roofies) to improve their chances of being the successful dad. They inject vision-imparing toxins during sex that cause temporary blindness in females and keep them from flying off to other males.The toxins identified in a new study are proteins contained in male bees' seminal fluid which helps maintain sperm. All honeybees make these proteins, though some may make more of it than others, and honeybee seminal fluid toxins can not only kill the sperm of rivals, it can cause temporary blindness, it turns out.

During puberty, male and female brains clearly become more distinct, with boys showing an increase in connectivity in certain brain areas previously identified as conferring risk for mood problems in adolescents, and girls showing a decrease in connectivity as puberty progresses. The researchers analyzed brain scans of 147 girls and 157 boys, aged between 13 and 15, from centers in Dublin, London, Dresden, Mannheim, and Paris.They were at varying puberty stages, from having not started their puberty to being fully mature. The researchers took images of the brain activity while the adolescent volunteers were lying still in an MRI scanner. 

First discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost sheep, the ancient Hebrew texts now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most well-preserved ancient written materials ever found.And among the roughly 900 full or partial scrolls found in the years since that first discovery, the best preserved is the Temple Scroll, at almost 25 feet also among the longest. It is the best-preserved even though its material is the thinnest of all of them (one-tenth of a millimeter, or roughly 1/250th of an inch thick). It also has the clearest, whitest writing surface of all the scrolls. 

Implanted brain electrodes can help alleviate symptoms of tremors like with Parkinson's disease but current probes face limitations due to their size and inflexibility.Neurotechnology may be on the verge of a major renaissance and mesh electronics could lead to a way to design personalized electronic treatment for just about anything related to the brain.

Emily E. Petersen, MD; Nicole L. Davis, PhD; David Goodman, PhD; et al. have produced a report on racial disparities in pregnancy-related deaths between 2007 and 2016.The sample is small, only about 700 women die of pregnancy or its complications each year, and that is out of 6,000,000 pregnancies, so it is hard to draw conclusions but data from CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) for 2007–2016 find that black and American Indian/Alaska Native women had significantly more pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 births than did white, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander women. 

Two statistical analyses looked at common disease incidence, hospitalization and death, plus modifiable cardiovascular risk factors in middle-aged adults across 21 High-Income, Middle-Income, and Low-Income Countries and found that cancer is now the leading cause of death in wealthier countries.That's a good thing. It means cardiovascular deaths are in decline, which means greater longevity. The number one risk factor for cancer is instead age.