Many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are biased and difficult to reproduce due to methodological flaws and poor reporting. Analysis of 176,620 RCTs published between 1966 and 2018 reveals that the risk of bias in RCTs generally decreased. Nevertheless, relatively high probabi … | Continue reading
Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet the networked nature of the web, combin … | Continue reading
The Dead Sea Scrolls are tangible evidence of the Bible’s ancient scribal culture. This study takes an innovative approach to palaeography—the study of ancient handwriting—as a new entry point to access this scribal culture. One of the problems of palaeography is to determine wri … | Continue reading
Why would a computational biologist with 40 years of research experience say bioinformatics is dead? The short answer is, in being the Founding Dean of a new School of Data Science, what we do suddenly looks different. | Continue reading
A study using Marek's disease virus in poultry shows that by reducing natural selection against highly virulent strains, imperfect vaccination enables the spread of viral strains that would otherwise be too lethal to persist. | Continue reading
The red macroalgae (seaweed) Asparagopsis spp. has shown to reduce ruminant enteric methane (CH4) production up to 99% in vitro. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of Asparagopsis taxiformis on CH4 production (g/day per animal), yield (g CH4/kg dry matter int … | Continue reading
The spread of COVID-19 and resulting local and national lockdowns have a host of potential consequences for demographic trends. While impacts on mortality and, to some extent, short-term migration flows are beginning to be documented, it is too early to measure actual consequence … | Continue reading
In the US, there are more than 163 million dogs and cats that consume, as a significant portion of their diet, animal products and therefore potentially constitute a considerable dietary footprint. Here, the energy and animal-derived product consumption of these pets in the US is … | Continue reading
Vaccinations are without doubt one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, and there is hope that they can constitute a solution to halt the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, the anti-vaccination movement is currently on the rise, spreading online misinformation about … | Continue reading
There is a widespread cross-cultural stereotype suggesting that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. Is there any truth to this notion? Building on theory about the cultural, (de)motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, the present research investigat … | Continue reading
We estimated the degree of gender discrimination in Sweden across occupations using a correspondence study design. Our analysis of employer responses to more than 3,200 fictitious job applications across 15 occupations revealed that overall positive employer response rates were h … | Continue reading
Wikipedia’s significant gender bias is widely acknowledged. In this paper we analyze the Spanish Wikipedia with the aim of estimating the percentage of women editors and measuring their engagement and editing practices with respect to their men counterparts. To identify the gende … | Continue reading
Author summary The novel pathogenic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19 and remains a threat to global public health. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have been shown to prevent viral infection in cell-culture systems, but human clinical trials did not observe a significant … | Continue reading
Geneticist Jonathan Flint reviews David Plotz's book The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. | Continue reading
The Earth’s geomagnetic field (GMF) is known to influence magnetoreceptive creatures, from bacteria to mammals as a sensory cue or a physiological modulator, despite it is largely thought that humans cannot sense the GMF. Here, we show that humans sense the GMF to orient their di … | Continue reading
Author summary Why was this study done? There is an inverse association between self-reported physical activity (PA) and occurrence of cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, there is uncertainty about the strength of this association as self-reported questionnaires are subject … | Continue reading
Although a great deal of attention has been paid to how conspiracy theories circulate on social media, and the deleterious effect that they, and their factual counterpart conspiracies, have on political institutions, there has been little computational work done on describing the … | Continue reading
This paper reports the results of a Bayesian analysis on large-scale empirical data to assess the effectiveness of eleven types of COVID-control policies that have been implemented at various levels of intensity in 40 countries and U.S. states since the onset of the pandemic. The … | Continue reading
Author summary Jet lag, a significant problem for travelers and shift workers, occurs when our body’s internal circadian (~24-hour) clock is misaligned with the time of day in the environment. Such circadian misalignment can lead to decreased performance, impaired sleep, and incr … | Continue reading
Exponential growth bias is the phenomenon whereby humans underestimate exponential growth. In the context of infectious diseases, this bias may lead to a failure to understand the magnitude of the benefit of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Communicating the same scenario in dif … | Continue reading
Erectile dysfunction (ED) is a debilitating medical condition and current treatments are ineffective in patients with cavernous nerve (CN) injury, due to penile remodeling and apoptosis. A critical regulator of penile smooth muscle and apoptosis is the secreted protein sonic hedg … | Continue reading
The omnipresence of smartphones among adolescents and adults gives rise to the questions about excessive use and personality factors which are associated with heavier engagement with these devices. Previous studies have found behavioral similarities between smartphone use and mal … | Continue reading
The omnipresence of smartphones among adolescents and adults gives rise to the questions about excessive use and personality factors which are associated with heavier engagement with these devices. Previous studies have found behavioral similarities between smartphone use and mal … | Continue reading
Fatigue is a common symptom in those presenting with symptomatic COVID-19 infection. However, it is unknown if COVID-19 results in persistent fatigue in those recovered from acute infection. We examined the prevalence of fatigue in individuals recovered from the acute phase of CO … | Continue reading
How does genetic variation give rise to differences in mathematical ability? Combining genotyping with brain imaging in children, this study shows that math performance can be predicted before school entry from individual volume differences of the right parietal cortex that are a … | Continue reading
Author summary Public health policies implemented to reduce the effects of COVID-19 can interact with each other, enhancing or undermining the effects of other policies employed simultaneously. Here, we present a mathematical model that incorporates many of the important characte … | Continue reading
Background In this paper, we predict the health and economic consequences of immediate investment in personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers (HCWs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Methods To account for health consequences, we estimated mortalit … | Continue reading
Studies of the gender pay gap are seldom able to simultaneously account for the range of alternative putative mechanisms underlying it. Using CloudResearch, an online microtask platform connecting employers to workers who perform research-related tasks, we examine whether gender … | Continue reading
Mood and behaviour are thought to be under considerable influence of the seasons, but evidence is not unequivocal. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether mood and affect are related to the seasons, and what is the role of neuroticism in this association. In a nation … | Continue reading
The SIR (‘susceptible-infectious-recovered’) formulation is used to uncover the generic spread mechanisms observed by COVID-19 dynamics globally, especially in the early phases of infectious spread. During this early period, potential controls were not effectively put in place or … | Continue reading
Failure to attend hospital appointments has a detrimental impact on care quality. Documented efforts to address this challenge have only modestly decreased no-show rates. Behavioral economics theory has suggested that more effective messages may lead to increased responsiveness. … | Continue reading
Background To investigate the association between serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and its effect on adverse clinical outcomes, and parameters of immune function and mortality due to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Study design The hospital data of 235 patients infected with COVID-19 w … | Continue reading
Social distancing, a non-pharmaceutical tactic aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19, can arise because individuals voluntarily distance from others to avoid contracting the disease. Alternatively, it can arise because of jurisdictional restrictions imposed by local authoritie … | Continue reading
Until treatment and vaccine for coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) becomes widely available, other methods of reducing infection rates should be explored. This study used a retrospective, observational analysis of deidentified tests performed at a national clinical laboratory to … | Continue reading
This study examined Leonardo da Vinci's rule (i.e., the sum of the cross-sectional area of all tree branches above a branching point at any height is equal to the cross-sectional area of the trunk or the branch immediately below the branching point) using simulations based on two … | Continue reading
Stories of g-tummo meditators mysteriously able to dry wet sheets wrapped around their naked bodies during a frigid Himalayan ceremony have intrigued scholars and laypersons alike for a century. Study 1 was conducted in remote monasteries of eastern Tibet with expert meditators p … | Continue reading
Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven to be one of the weakest links when protecting critical infrastructure in genera … | Continue reading
Pathologists and radiologists spend years acquiring and refining their medically essential visual skills, so it is of considerable interest to understand how this process actually unfolds and what image features and properties are critical for accurate diagnostic performance. Key … | Continue reading
Author summary We present ARGweaver-D, an extension of the ARGweaver algorithm which can be applied under a user-defined demographic model including population splits and migration events. Given genome sequence data from a collection of individuals across multiple closely related … | Continue reading
Several species of dryland cyanobacteria are known to occur as hypoliths under semi-translucent rocks. In the Mojave Desert, these organisms find refuge from intense solar radiation under milky quartz where moisture persists for a longer period of time than in adjacent soil surfa … | Continue reading
Animal research indicates that a combination of physical activity and sensory enrichment has the largest and the only sustaining effect on adult neuroplasticity. Dancing has been suggested as a human homologue to this combined intervention as it poses demands on both physical and … | Continue reading
Conspiratorial ideation is the tendency of individuals to believe that events and power relations are secretly manipulated by certain clandestine groups and organisations. Many of these ostensibly explanatory conjectures are non-falsifiable, lacking in evidence or demonstrably fa … | Continue reading
A foreign dynasty, known as the Hyksos, ruled parts of Egypt between c. 1638–1530 BCE. Their origins are thought to be rooted in the Near East, which is supported by architectural features and grave accoutrements of Tell el-Dabca. In this former Hyksos capital in the Eastern Nile … | Continue reading
We previously showed, in a pilot study with publicly available data, that T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires from tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) could be distinguished from adjacent healthy tissue repertoires by the presence of TCRs bearing specific, biophysicochemical moti … | Continue reading
Misinformation can undermine a well-functioning democracy. For example, public misconceptions about climate change can lead to lowered acceptance of the reality of climate change and lowered support for mitigation policies. This study experimentally explored the impact of misinfo … | Continue reading
To what extent do children believe in real, unreal, natural and supernatural figures relative to each other, and to what extent are features of culture responsible for belief? Are some figures, like Santa Claus or an alien, perceived as more real than figures like Princess Elsa o … | Continue reading