Scientists create tool to explore billions of social media messages, potentially predict political and financial turmoil
For thousands of years, people looked into the night sky with their naked eyes — and told stories about the few visible stars. Then we invented telescopes. In 1840, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle claimed that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Then we started posting on Twitter. Now scientists […]
Phone Calls Spot Early Alzheimer’s
Speech patterns in phone conversations can spot people with early to moderate Alzheimer’s dementia, a Japanese study suggested. A machine-learning predictive model correctly identified people with Alzheimer’s dementia with about 90% accuracy using audio files of phone conversations of 24 people with confirmed Alzheimer’s and 99 healthy controls, reported Akihiro Shimoda, MPH, of McCann Health […]
Enabling the ‘imagination’ of artificial intelligence
Imagine an orange cat. Now, imagine the same cat, but with coal-black fur. Now, imagine the cat strutting along the Great Wall of China. Doing this, a quick series of neuron activations in your brain will come up with variations of the picture presented, based on your previous knowledge of the world. In other words, […]
Fuzzy OS Benefits in Drug Labels; Zantac Suit Dismissed; Cancer Deaths Drop For Now
The overall survival benefits associated with use of many newly approved cancer drugs are often not clearly communicated in drug labels. (JAMA Internal Medicine) A reduced-dose CT scan of 0.3 mSv can safely be used to detect lung nodules in children with cancer without sacrificing diagnostic accuracy. (American Journal of Roentgenology) A federal judge has […]
Half of Severe COVID Patients Developed New Medical Issues
Nearly half of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 experienced at least one complication, researchers found in a prospective study. There were 49.7% of patients overall who developed one or more COVID-19 complications, and 43.5% of survivors with a minimum of one complication, reported Ewen M. Harrison, MBChB, PhD, from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and […]
Ultra-processed food linked to higher risk of IBD: Further studies needed to identify contributory factors in processed foods that might account for these associations
A higher intake of ultra-processed food is associated with higher risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), finds a study published by The BMJ today. Ultra-processed foods include packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, ready meals containing food additives, and reconstituted meat and fish products — often containing high levels of added sugar, […]
‘Neuroprosthesis’ restores words to man with paralysis: Technology could lead to more natural communication for people who have suffered speech loss
Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen. The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a […]
Dogs may not return their owners’ good deeds: In experiments, dogs did not reciprocate food-giving nor act more favorably towards helpful humans
Domestic dogs show many adaptations to living closely with humans, but they do not seem to reciprocate food-giving according to a study, publishing July 14 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, led by Jim McGetrick and colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria. The researchers trained 37 domestic dogs to operate a […]
Impairments found in neurons derived from people with schizophrenia and genetic mutation
A scientific team has shown that the release of neurotransmitters in the brain is impaired in patients with schizophrenia who have a rare, single-gene mutation known to predispose people to a range of neurodevelopmental disorders. Significantly, the results from the research with human-derived neurons validated previous and new experiments that found the same major decrease […]
Which Came First: Low Testosterone Levels or Severe COVID-19?
Low testosterone levels in men with symptomatic COVID-19 were associated with a greater risk of severe illness or death, according to Italian researchers. Their case-control study found that, among men admitted to the emergency department of a Milan Hospital during the first wave of the pandemic, the lower the level of testosterone the higher the […]