#Nidhi Subbaraman

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Nidhi Subbaraman

Published: May 14, 2024

Wiley will announce that it will shutter 19 more journals, some tainted by fraud.

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat."

The sources of the fake science are “paper mills"—businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

World-over, scientists are under pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals—sometimes to win grants, other times as conditions for promotions. Researchers say this motivates people to cheat the system. Many journals charge a fee to authors to publish in them.

Problematic papers typically appear in batches of up to hundreds or even thousands within a publisher or journal. A signature move is to submit the same paper to multiple journals at once to maximize the chance of getting in, according to an industry trade group now monitoring the problem. Publishers say some fraudsters have even posed as academics to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.

“The paper mill will find the weakest link and then exploit it mercilessly until someone notices," said Nick Wise, an engineer who has documented paper-mill advertisements on social media and posts examples regularly on X under the handle @author_for_sale.

The journal Science flagged the practice of buying authorship in 2013. The website Retraction Watch and independent researchers have since tracked paper mills through their advertisements and websites. Researchers say they have found them in multiple countries including Russia, Iran, Latvia, China and India. The mills solicit clients on social channels such as Telegram or Facebook, where they advertise the titles of studies they intend to submit, their fee and sometimes the journal they aim to infiltrate. Wise said he has seen costs ranging from as little as $50 to as much as $8,500.

When publishers become alert to the work, mills change their tactics.

“It’s like a virus mutating," said Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, one of a multitude of researchers who track fraudulent science and has spotted suspected milled papers.

For Wiley, which publishes more than 2,000 journals, the problem came to light two years ago, shortly after it paid nearly $300 million for Hindawi, a company founded in Egypt in 1997 that included about 250 journals. In 2022, a little more than a year after the purchase, scientists online noticed peculiarities in dozens of studies from journals in the Hindawi family.

Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich." Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.

“The problem was much worse and much larger than anyone had realized," said David Bimler, a retired psychology researcher in Wellington, New Zealand, who started a spreadsheet of suspect Hindawi studies, which grew to thousands of entries.

Within weeks, Wiley said its Hindawi portfolio had been deeply hit.

Over the next year, in 2023, 19 Hindawi journals were delisted from a key database, Web of Science, that researchers use to find and cite papers relevant to their work, eroding the standing of the journals, whose influence is measured by how frequently its papers are cited by others. (One was later relisted.)

Wiley said it would shut down four that had been “​​heavily compromised by paper mills," and for months it paused publishing Hindawi special issues entirely as hundreds of papers were retracted. In December, Wiley interim President and Chief Executive Matthew Kissner warned investors of a $35 million to $40 million revenue drop for the 2024 fiscal year because of the problems with Hindawi.

According to Wiley, Tuesday’s closures are due to multiple factors, including a rebranding of the Hindawi journals and low submission rates to some titles. A company spokesperson acknowledged that some were affected by paper mills but declined to say how many. Eleven were among those that lost accreditation this past year on Web of Science.

“I don’t think that journal closures happen routinely," said Jodi Schneider, who studies scientific literature and publishing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The extent of the paper mill problem has been exposed by members of the scientific community who on their own have collected patterns in faked papers to recognize this fraud at scale and developed tools to help surface the work.

One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener," run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases."

Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer" became “bosom peril"; “fluid dynamics" became “gooey stream"; “artificial intelligence" became “counterfeit consciousness." The tool is publicly available.

Another data scientist, Adam Day, built “The Papermill Alarm," a tool that uses large language models to spot signs of trouble in an article’s metadata, such as multiple suspect papers citing each other or using similar templates and simply altering minor experimental details. Publishers can pay to use the tool.

With the scale of the paper-mill problem coming into ever better focus, it has forced publishers to adjust their operations.

IOP Publishing has expanded teams doing systematic checks on papers and invested in software to document and record peer review steps beyond their journals.

Wiley has expanded its team working to spot bad papers and announced its version of a paper-mill detector that scans for patterns such as tortured phrases. “It’s a top three issue for us today," said Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of research and learning, at Wiley.

Both Wiley and Springer Nature have beefed up their screening protocols for editors of special issues after seeing paper millers impersonate legitimate researchers to win such spots.

Springer Nature has rejected more than 8,000 papers from a suspected paper mill and is continuing to monitor its work, according to Chris Graf, the publisher’s research-integrity director.

The incursion of paper mills has also forced competing publishers to collaborate. A tool launched through STM, the trade group of publishers, now checks whether new submissions were submitted to multiple journals at once, according to Joris van Rossum, product director who leads the “STM Integrity Hub," launched in part to beat back paper mills. Last fall, STM added Day’s “The Papermill Alarm" to its suite of tools.

While publishers are fighting back with technology, paper mills are using the same kind of tools to stay ahead.

“Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket," Eggleton of IOP Publishing said. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing."

[ Via: mirror (turn off Javascript) ]

[blueiscoool]

Have Researchers Found Amelia Earhart’s Long-Lost Plane?

A new sonar image shows an airplane-shaped object resting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, not far from where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, went missing in 1937.

On July 2, 1937, pioneering pilot Amelia Earhart vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean near the end of her historic around-the-world flight. For decades, her mysterious disappearance has perplexed explorers, who have spent millions of dollars trying to find her missing Lockheed 10-E Electra plane.

Now, a possible new clue has emerged in the case: A sonar image captured during an expedition last fall shows an airplane-shaped object sitting on the ocean floor, not far from where experts believe Earhart likely crashed, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Nidhi Subbaraman.

The blurred object is far from definitive proof, but Dorothy Cochrane, an aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, tells Smithsonian magazine it’s “an intriguing image” that warrants a second look.

The expedition was led by Tony Romeo, who is a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Air Force, a pilot and a commercial real estate investor from South Carolina. In 2021, he sold his real estate properties and spent $11 million to fund the trip, including buying high-tech equipment to aid in the search.

“This has been a story that’s always intrigued me, and all the things in my life kind of collided at the right moment,” Romeo tells Business Insider’s Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert and Rebecca Rommen. “I was getting out of real estate and looking for a new project, so even though I really started about 18 months ago, this was something I’ve been thinking and researching for a long time.”

Last September, a team from the exploration company Deep Sea Vision, which Romeo founded, departed from Tarawa, Kiribati, in the South Pacific aboard a research vessel. Working in 36-hour shifts, the 16-person crew used an underwater autonomous vehicle equipped with sonar to scour the sea floor, scanning roughly 5,200 total square miles.

About 90 days into the trip, the team was reviewing sonar images and noticed something unusual in the data from some 60 days prior. The mysterious object looked to be about the same shape and size as an aircraft, and it was identified roughly 100 miles from Howland Island, which is within the region where experts think Earhart’s plane went down. The object is around 16,400 feet below the water’s surface.

By then, however, the crew had determined it was too late to return to the site for a closer look. The camera on the underwater vehicle was also broken, which meant they wouldn’t be able to see anything if they did circle back, reports the Post and Courier’s Tony Bartelme.

But Romeo is undeterred and hopes to revisit the area in the future.

“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” he tells the Wall Street Journal. “I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”

In the meantime, the sonar image is not detailed enough for experts to draw any definitive conclusions.

“It definitely appears to be an aircraft of some sort,” David Jourdan, who has searched three times for Earhart’s missing plane and is the co-founder and president of the ocean exploration company Nauticos, tells the Post and Courier. “It has aircraft-like features. But sound is funny. It can mislead you. We can’t say it’s her plane until you put a camera on it.”

To truly identify the object, future missions would ideally capture detailed images that contain the registration number of the plane, says Cochrane. Or, at the very least, they might more clearly show the submerged object’s dimensions and shape to see if it matches the model of Earhart’s vehicle.

“It really requires further research,” says Cochrane. “Finding something that’s really worth investigating further is step one. Verifying it’s the actual craft is step two. And step three becomes: Is it possible to recover this or not, or should it just be left where it is?”

At the time of her disappearance, Earhart was a global celebrity—speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Romeo likens her to Taylor Swift today. In June 1928, Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean (as a passenger of pilots Wilmer Stultz and Lou Gordon), a feat that propelled her to international stardom.

Nearly four years later, in May 1932, she made history again by becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Later that year, she became the first woman to fly solo across North America and back. And in 1935, she became the first person, regardless of gender, to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California.

In the summer of 1936, the renowned pilot began to plan her most ambitious trip yet: a circumnavigation of the globe. On May 20, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, departed from Oakland for the first leg of the trip. They flew nearly 22,000 miles, making stops in Miami, South America, Africa and India along their eastward route.

By late June, they had made it to Lae, Papua New Guinea. After a few days’ rest, they departed for Howland Island, a small, uninhabited outcrop in the Pacific where a refueling station had been built for their journey. The U.S. Coast Guard had a vessel, the Itasca, stationed nearby to help with the landing.

Operators aboard the Itasca heard Earhart’s radio messages as she got closer and closer to the island. But eventually, they lost contact. Earhart and Noonan were never seen or heard from again.

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard spent 16 days searching for the missing duo without success. About one and a half years later, on January 5, 1939, Earhart was declared dead.

Theories abound about her mysterious disappearance—some onlookers have speculated that she was a spy or that she was captured by a foreign military. But Cochrane believes the simplest explanation is the most plausible: that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel near Howland Island.

“She’s got to be around there somewhere,” she adds.

By Sarah Kuta.

[harvest-moonie]

cheese part 7 References

Fankhauser, David B. (2007). "Fankhauser's Cheese Page". Archived from the original on September 25, 2007. Retrieved September 23, 2007. Jones, G. Stephen (January 29, 2013). "Conversation with a Cheesemonger". The Reluctant Gourmet. Archived from the original on June 24, 2012. Retrieved July 16, 2012. Johnson, M.E. (2017). "A 100-Year Review: Cheese production and quality". Journal of Dairy Science. 100 (12): 9952–9965. doi:10.3168/jds.2017-12979. ISSN0022-0302. PMID29153182. Kommenda, Niko; Nevitt, Caroline; Terazono, Emiko; Joiner, Sam; Davies, Ellen (June 30, 2022). "Would carbon food labels change the way you shop?". Financial Times. Archived from the original on November 24, 2022. Simpson, D. P. (1979). Cassell's Latin Dictionary (5th ed.). London: Cassell Ltd. p. 883. ISBN978-0-304-52257-6. "cheese". Online Etymology Dictionary. Archived from the original on April 4, 2017. Retrieved April 3, 2017. Silanikove, Nissim; Leitner, Gabriel; Merin, Uzi (2015). "The Interrelationships between Lactose Intolerance and the Modern Dairy Industry: Global Perspectives in Evolutional and Historical Backgrounds". Nutrients. 7 (9): 7312–7331. doi:10.3390/nu7095340. PMC4586535. PMID26404364. Jenny Ridgwell, Judy Ridgway, Food around the World, (1986) Oxford University Press, ISBN0-19-832728-5 Subbaraman, Nidhi (December 12, 2012). "Art of cheese-making is 7,500 years old". Nature News. doi:10.1038/nature.2012.12020. S2CID180646880. Archived from the original on February 1, 2013. Retrieved December 12, 2012. "History of Cheese". www.gol27.com. Archived from the original on July 21, 2017. Retrieved December 23, 2014. "Cheese discovered in Ancient Egypt tomb". BBC News. August 18, 2018. Archived from the original on August 19, 2018. Retrieved August 20, 2018. "World's Oldest Cheese Discovered in Ancient Egyptian Tomb". Time. Archived from the original on August 22, 2018. Retrieved August 20, 2018. Watson, Traci (February 25, 2014). "Oldest Cheese Found". USA Today. Archived from the original on December 11, 2020. Retrieved February 25, 2015. Homer. Odyssey. Translated by Butler, Samuel. 9.216, 9.231. Archived from the original on September 27, 2020. Retrieved August 21, 2018. Capasso, L. (August 1, 2002). "Bacteria in Two-millennia-old Cheese, and Related Epizoonoses in Roman Populations". Journal of Infection. 45 (2): 122–127. doi:10.1053/jinf.2002.0996. ISSN0163-4453. PMID12217720. Archived from the original on June 7, 2021. Retrieved June 7, 2021. Papademas, Photis; Bintsis, Thomas (2017). Global Cheesemaking Technology: Cheese Quality and Characteristics. John Wiley & Sons. p. 190. ISBN9781119046172. Archived from the original on February 17, 2023. Retrieved February 1, 2023. The production of [Swiss] cheese was mentionned for the first time in the first century by Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who called the cheese Caseus Helveticus, the 'cheese of the Helvetians', one of the tribes living in Switzerland at the time.

[yapytaupeishasblog]

EL HOMICIDIO ES UNA DE LAS PRINCIPALES CAUSAS DE MUERTE MATERNA EN ESTADOS UNIDOS

NOTICIA 12 noviembre 2021 La evaluación de los certificados de defunción de la base de datos nacional pinta un panorama sombrío para las mujeres embarazadas. Nidhi Subbaraman Una mujer habla en una protesta para exigir normas para prevenir la violencia contra las mujeres. Crédito: Nicholas Kamm / AFP vía Getty Las mujeres embarazadas en los Estados Unidos mueren por homicidio con más…

[olgagarmash]

US health agency will invest $1 billion to investigate ‘long COVID’ – Nature.com

NEWS

04 March 2021

The National Institutes of Health will fund researchers to track people’s recovery, and will host a biospecimen bank.

Nidhi Subbaraman

Search for this author in:

US National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins has announced an initiative to study the effects of COVID-19 that can last for weeks or months.Credit: Saul Loeb/CNP via Zuma Wire

The United States has announced that it will spend big on research into ‘long COVID’ — the long-lasting health effects of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The funding comes as the scientific community is just starting to recognize the impact of the condition and unravel why it occurs. On 23 February, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced an initiative worth US$1.15 billion over four years to fund investigations of the condition, and listed some first priorities.

Symptoms of long COVID are wide-ranging and include fatigue, fevers and shortness of breath, as well as neurological conditions such as anxiety and depression, and an inability to concentrate. They can appear weeks after a SARS-CoV-2 infection and linger for months. The NIH has begun referring to the collection of after-effects as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC.

Some of the NIH PASC Initiative’s main goals are to better understand the biological basis of PASC, and what makes some people more vulnerable to the condition than others — with a view towards eventually finding treatments.

“We do not know yet the magnitude of the problem, but given the number of individuals of all ages who have been or will be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the public health impact could be profound,” NIH director Francis Collins said in a statement announcing the effort. A study1 of 177 people published last month determined that 9 months after infection with SARS-CoV-2, one-third of them were still reporting symptoms such as fatigue. This shows that with more than 115 million COVID-19 infections worldwide so far, the number of people with PASC could be massive.

“Other than the general consensus that the phenomenon is real, all we really know are the questions,” says Steven Deeks, a physician and infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who is leading a project to study people with long-lasting effects from COVID-19.

A fuller picture

One of the first projects the NIH has said it will fund is a recovery-tracking effort. Investigators will collaborate to record the recovery paths of at least 40,000 adults and children with SARS-CoV-2 in a ‘metacohort’, to observe who develops long-term effects and who doesn’t. The metacohort will cover people of all ages, including pregnant people, to help researchers pin down the range of effects that people experience while recovering from an infection.

Such long-term tracking is necessary to gain a fuller picture of the phenomenon, says Carlos del Rio, an epidemiologist and infectious-disease physician at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has called for lengthy longitudinal studies to improve understanding of the disease2.

A separate project will record the effects of COVID-19 on various organ systems by collecting evidence from autopsies. This type of analysis has so far indicated that the disease can destroy tissue in the lungs, as well as other organs — but researchers would like more detailed information. In another effort, the NIH will host a bank of biospecimens such as blood, urine, faeces and cerebrospinal fluid from people with PASC; researchers will be able to access the samples to inform future studies.

Patient perspectives

People who have experienced COVID-19 and its long-term aftermath, including some researchers, have mobilized to argue that better attention should be paid to post-COVID effects.

Such groups are worried about whether and how researchers will take their experience into consideration, says Shobita Parthasarathy, director of the science, technology and policy programme at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “There is a concern among patients that their experience and knowledge won’t be taken seriously — that in the process of becoming a scientific inquiry, their experiences will not be used to guide the understanding of the condition.”

“It’s a confusing and difficult illness to describe if you haven’t had it,” says Hannah Davis, who is one of the leaders of Patient Led Research For COVID-19, an international group of researchers and advocates who themselves have long COVID. “I think that working with patients will facilitate understanding of long COVID much more quickly.” The NIH’s name for the condition, PASC, is more accurate than some others that researchers have proposed, says Davis, but it is a departure from ‘long COVID’, the name that people with the condition have themselves settled on.

So far, the NIH has received $3.6 billion from the US Congress to fund COVID-19-related work and research, in addition to the $1.15 billion for studies of PASC .

In February, the UK National Institute for Health Research announced it was investing £18.5 million (US$25.9 million) to fund four studies of long COVID.

“It is of course impossible to truly understand the long-term consequences of a disease that did not exist a year ago,” says Deeks. “We are doing our best, but this will take time.”

References

1.

Logue, J. K. et al. JAMA Netw. Open 4, e210830 (2021).

2.

Del Rio, C., Collins, L. F. & Malani, P. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 324, 1723–1724 (2020).

Download references

Latest on:

SARS-CoV-2

Public health

An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday.

Related Articles

source https://wealthch.com/us-health-agency-will-invest-1-billion-to-investigate-long-covid-nature-com/

[diaspora9ja]

ten people who helped shape science in 2020

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: A pressure in physics

A cosmologist pursues the character of darkish matter whereas additionally confronting racism in science and society.

By Nidhi Subbaraman

Credit score: Kayana Szymczak for Nature

It has been a busy yr for cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. She gained two new grants, employed her first postdoctoral researcher and started co-directing a bunch that’s mapping out the subsequent 20 years of analysis utilizing astrophysical observations to check darkish matter. She additionally completed her first guide, began one other, wrote a month-to-month column for New Scientist journal, printed two chapters in books within the discipline of schooling analysis and guided two graduate college students by their first publications of their PhD programmes. She did this whereas coming into her second yr as a tenure-track professor on the College of New Hampshire in Durham.

However that wasn’t all. In early June, she and different scientists organized the Strike for Black Lives, a high-profile on-line marketing campaign to demand that establishments confront racism in science and anti-Black racism all through society. The thought grew out of a web-based chat she was having with Brian Nord, a physicist on the Fermi Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. At about the identical time, Brittany Kamai, a physicist on the College of California, Santa Cruz, e-mailed Prescod-Weinstein to inform her about her personal plan to name for a shutdown as a approach to push for change. The volunteer effort grew, and the 2 groups coordinated to get the phrase out.

“I used to be actually bored with enterprise as regular persevering with within the physics neighborhood,” says Prescod-Weinstein.

The dimensions of the response was unprecedented, says Raychelle Burks, an analytical chemist at American College in Washington DC who usually makes use of her skilled Twitter profile to champion inclusion in science. “It’s one thing I NEVER thought I’d see in my lifetime,” she wrote in an e-mail to Nature. It was a second of reorientation for a lot of white scientists, says Nord. “I noticed a number of colleagues transition to some extent the place they noticed racial justice in STEM as a part of their accountability.”

The motion achieved such consideration partially due to the achieved scientists who signed on, and Prescod-Weinstein isn’t any exception. Her ardour for science and arithmetic was clear early on. Impressed by A Temporary Historical past of Time, the 1991 documentary about Stephen Hawking directed by Errol Morris, Prescod-Weinstein determined at a younger age that she needed a profession in physics.

She studied physics at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and astronomy on the College of California, Santa Cruz, then went on to earn a doctorate on the College of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada and a fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Know-how in Cambridge, amongst different appointments. She is now a member of the physics and astronomy division on the College of New Hampshire, making her in all probability the primary Black girl to carry a tenure-track place in theoretical cosmology or particle idea in the USA. She additionally has an appointment within the ladies’s and gender research division there.

As she pursued her work on the physics of the early Universe, ultimately learning darkish matter and hypothetical particles known as axions, she discovered she was nearly all the time the one Black physicist in any room. So she has usually needed to battle to justify her place within the discipline. Guided by her personal experiences and a way of responsibility to the subsequent technology of physicists, she has frequently known as out racism and sexism in science. “The implications of staying silent weren’t habitable,” she says.

The June name for a strike and shutdown got here after the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others, many in interactions with police. Their deaths “are just some examples of the violence and racism that Black individuals stay with day-after-day — and have for hundreds of years — within the US, Canada, and around the globe”, in keeping with a name to motion by Particles for Justice, a bunch of physicists who’ve beforehand spoken out about sexism in science. Prescod-Weinstein takes pains to level out that neither she nor anybody else was accountable for Particles for Justice — it was a really collective effort, a “household”, she says.

“As physicists, we consider a tutorial strike is urgently wanted: to hit pause, to present Black teachers a break and to present others a chance to replicate on their very own complicity in anti-Black racism in academia and their native and international communities,” mentioned Particles for Justice.

The teams additionally challenged scientific establishments to decide to taking motion to make their organizations extra inclusive and actively anti-racist, utilizing the social-media hashtags #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia and #StrikeForBlackLives.

By the day of the occasion, 10 June, main educational teams with, collectively, tons of of 1000’s of members had pledged to hitch the strike. Amongst them have been the American Geophysical Union, the American Bodily Society and the American Chemical Society. Publishers joined in, together with the American Affiliation for the Development of Science, which publishes Science. (Nature also announced that it will use the day to replicate and craft measures to remove anti‑Black racism.)

Prescod-Weinstein’s work spans astrophysics and particle idea. For example, she is focused on how axions may affect the formation of galaxies and different constructions. She’s additionally starting to make use of astrophysical observations to discover what the properties of axions may be and whether or not the particles might be the Universe’s darkish matter, which researchers have been trying to find a long time. “My curiosity in them goes past the darkish matter query simply to the query of do they exist, in the event that they exist, and the way do they behave?” she says.

She has already collected a string of accolades in recognition of her work and one other will come subsequent yr: the American Bodily Society is honouring Prescod-Weinstein for her work in cosmology and particle physics and for her efforts to extend inclusivity in physics. And subsequent March will deliver the publication of her first guide, The Disordered Cosmos, about physics and astronomy, and the problems of entry and identification in scientific areas.

Her work throughout these totally different spheres is hardly achieved. Though many took 10 June to provide statements on how they plan to enhance circumstances for Black teachers, the one assertion that issues would be the actions they take. “The revolution didn’t occur that day, however it’s my hope that possibly we planted some seeds for individuals to radically rethink what is critical with a view to save Black lives,” says Prescod‑Weinstein.

Source link

from Diaspora9ja https://diaspora9ja.com/ten-people-who-helped-shape-science-in-2020/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ten-people-who-helped-shape-science-in-2020

[christinamac1]

Joe Biden on climate change

Joe Biden on climate change

What a Joe Biden presidency would mean for five key science issues. The coronavirus pandemic, climate

change and space exploration are among the issues that Biden will influence if he wins the upcoming US election. Nature, Amy Maxmen, Nidhi Subbaraman, Jeff Tollefson, Giuliana Viglione &  Alexandra Witze, 2 Oct 20, 

”……………..Pandemic response

If Biden wins the election on 3 November, he will…

[snapzubusiness]

“I'm proud of being a leader of a poop cult,” Jillian Mai Thi Epperly once joked to fans of her signature recipe: a fermented slurry of salted cabbage that produces “waterfalls” of diarrhea. Here's the wild story of how she convinced thousands to believe her dangerous science, and how a grassroots movement shut her down when Facebook wouldn't. By Nidhi Subbaraman. via Snapzu : Business & Economy

[phooll123]

New Flavored E-Cigarettes Are Bad For Teens, Doctors Say In New FDA Lawsuit

The FDA announced it would delay regulation of e-cigarettes until 2022. But major health groups say that decision is unlawful, and could turn more teens into regular smokers.

Originally posted on March 27, 2018, at 5:59 p.m.

Updated on March 27, 2018, at 6:56 p.m.

Nidhi Subbaraman

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Reporting FromWashington, D.C.

Major health groups filed a lawsuitagainst the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, claiming that the agency’s decision to delay regulating e-cigarettes leaves teens and young adults vulnerable to tobacco addiction.

The health groups, which include the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association, claim that the lack of regulation is allowing products that are uniquely appealing to kids to proliferate unchecked.

“The American Heart Association believes protecting the health of young people in this country should be one of the FDA’s top priorities and that’s why our organization joined this lawsuit,” Mark Schoeberl, executive vice president of advocacy and health quality at the American Heart Association, told BuzzFeed News.

As part of a historic revision of its tobacco regulation plan, last summer the FDA announced that e-cigarette makers had until August 2022 to register their products with the agency, and submit detailed information about the health impacts of those products. Recent regulatory changes gave the agency jurisdiction over nicotine delivery devices like e-cigarettes.

FDA spokesperson Michael Felberbaum told BuzzFeed News that the agency does not comment on pending, possible, or ongoing litigation.

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Share

Pin

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said that the legal action was prompted in part by the recent boom in popularity of vaporizer brands like the JUUL among young adults. (The sleek device vaporizes liquid containing nicotine and is sold in a range of flavors like “Mango,” “Fruit Medley,” and “Cool Cucumber.”)

A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control found that over two million middle school and high school kids used e-cigarettes in 2016, making it the most commonly used tobacco product in that age group.

“We are deeply concerned that by delaying for years the FDA’s review of individual products that our now being used by kids, means that our kids will remain in unnecessary jeopardy,” Myers told BuzzFeed News.

JUUL Labs spokesperson Victoria Davis wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email that the company’s mission is to offer adult smokers an alternative to cigarettes. “We strongly condemn the use of our product by minors, and it is in fact illegal to sell our product to minors,” Davis said.

In the complaint filed in the US District Court for the District of Maryland on Tuesday, the groups argue that the agency’s decision to delay the deadline was made without a public comment period, and allows the agency to shirk oversight actions required by the 2009 Tobacco Control Act. The guidance, they claim in the complaint, “is arbitrary and capricious and not the product of reasoned decision making.”

“By delaying this, it’s continuing the wild wild west that we’ve had since 2008,” Erika Sward, assistant vice president of national advocacy at the American Lung Association, told BuzzFeed News.

The FDA included plans for e-cigarette regulation as part of a broad roadmap for tobacco regulation. In the same announcement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said that the agency would explore limiting nicotine levels in tobacco products to non-addictive levels.

Some public health researchers argue that there are benefits to the agency’s decision to delay e-cigarette regulation.

A series of studies have suggested that e-cigarettes can aid smokers looking to quit, and a costly and lengthy regulatory process could limit the market to large tobacco companies, Kenneth Warner, emeritus professor of public health at the University of Michigan, told BuzzFeed News.

“You’re guaranteeing you’re going to kill off all the novel products and we’re going to once again be favoring the cigarette which is by far the most deadly of all tobacco products,” he said.

There is also debate about whether young people who smoke e-cigarettes turn into regular smokers. “There is this enormous anxiety in the public health community about e-cigarettes leading kids to smoke — we don’t know that that’s true,” he said.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2upSJSx

[bizkaffee]

NIH's new sexual-harassment rules are still too weak, say critics - Nature.com

NIH’s new sexual-harassment rules are still too weak, say critics – Nature.com

NEWS 25 June 2020 The agency has outlined actions it may take to deal with bullies and harassers, but it still relies on universities to report bad behaviour. Nidhi Subbaraman Search for this author in:

NIH director Francis Collins has been criticised for not moving faster to strengthen the agency’s policies against harassment.Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty

The US National Institutes…

[dinafbrownil]

KHN’s ‘What The Health?’: ACA Still Under A Cloud After Court Ruling

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-d8adb437e0a34f1c32eb854717732cd3') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-d8adb437e0a34f1c32eb854717732cd3' }, "https:\/\/embeds.kff.org" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'embeds.kff.org' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on SoundCloud.

Julie Rovner

Kaiser Health News

@jrovner

Read Julie's Stories

Kimberly Leonard

Washington Examiner

@leonardkl

Read Kimberly's Stories

Alice Miranda Ollstein

Politico

@AliceOllstein

Read Alice's Stories

Margot Sanger-Katz

The New York Times

@sangerkatz

Read Margot's Stories

The fate of the Affordable Care Act continues to be in doubt after a federal appeals court ruling in New Orleans. By a 2-1 vote, the three-judge panel ruled that the “individual mandate” provision of the health law — which requires people to have health coverage — is unconstitutional now that Congress has reduced the penalty to zero. But the judges sent the case back to the lower court to determine how much else of the law can remain in light of that finding.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are preparing to leave for the year having finished a gigantic spending bill that includes many changes to health policy. However, the two biggest health priorities of the year — doing something about “surprise” medical bills and prescription drug prices — remain undone.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner from Kaiser Health News, Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Kimberly Leonard of the Washington Examiner and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

The federal appeals court decision on the future of the ACA means the District Court judge will likely need to take into consideration Congress’ intent when it dropped the penalty for not having insurance but made no other changes to the law.

Although the legal ramifications of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision won’t be clear for months, the ruling could affect the 2020 campaign season. Republicans may be relieved that the future of the ACA is not front and center, but Democrats have an opening to argue that the law is still very much endangered, as well as its popular provision guaranteeing coverage to people with preexisting medical problems.

One of the surprises in Congress’ spending bill was a provision that preserves states’ ability to approve “silver loading” by insurers on the ACA’s insurance marketplaces. Under that workaround, insurers raise the prices of midlevel silver-level plans to recoup some expenses that the federal government is no longer paying. In some states, not only has this worked well for the insurer, it has pushed federal subsidies higher so that consumers can more easily buy plans.

The spending bill also included the CREATES Act, which aims to foster competition and drive down prescription drug costs by making it easier for generic drugmakers to develop and test their products.

The administration Wednesday unveiled a proposed rule for states to import drugs from Canada, but it is expected to take months, if not longer, before any federal approvals are issued.

Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The New York Times’ “In France, Dying at Home Can Mean a Long Wait for a Doctor,” by Norimitsu Onishi

Margot Sanger-Katz: ProPublica’s “What Happens When a Health Plan Has No Limits? An Acupuncturist Earns $677 a Session,” by Marshall Allen

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Nature’s “US Biomedical Agency Has Investigated Hundreds of Claims of Inappropriate Conduct This Year,” by Nidhi Subbaraman

Kimberly Leonard: BuzzFeed News’ “The Last Decade Was Disastrous for Abortion Rights. Advocates Are Trying to Figure Out What’s Next,” by Ema O’Connor

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to What the Health? on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or Pocket Casts.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/khns-what-the-health-aca-still-under-a-cloud-after-court-ruling/

[tribunamag]

Tweeted

Young adults with Type 1 diabetes are rationing, stockpiling, and turning to the black market for the medication they need to stay alive — incredibly risky and desperate measures that could result in long-term harm or death. https://t.co/41N918RaSu @ellievhall reports

— Nidhi Subbaraman (@NidhiSubs) July 21, 2019

[usatodaytrendingnewsworld-blog]

Democrat Lucy McBath Ran For Congress After Her Son's Murder And Won

Democrat Lucy McBath Ran For Congress After Her Son’s Murder And Won

Author: Nidhi Subbaraman

McBath defeated Republican Karen Handel in Georgia’s 6th district.

[yapytaupeishasblog]

𝗘𝗟 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗚𝗜𝗢 𝗗𝗘𝗟 𝗗𝗘𝗟𝗧𝗔 𝗘𝗡 𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗦 𝗩𝗔𝗖𝗨𝗡𝗔𝗗𝗔𝗦 .

Saltar al contenido principal Búsqueda Acceso Contenido Información de la revista Publicar NOTICIAS 12 de agosto de 2021 ¿Cómo contagian Delta las personas vacunadas? Lo que dice la ciencia Los datos emergentes sugieren que Delta podría propagarse más fácilmente que otras variantes del coronavirus entre las personas vacunadas contra COVID-19. Pero quedan preguntas clave. Nidhi Subbaraman Tiene…

[olgagarmash]

NEWS

04 March 2021

The National Institutes of Health will fund researchers to track people’s recovery, and will host a biospecimen bank.

Nidhi Subbaraman

Search for this author in:

US National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins has announced an initiative to study the effects of COVID-19 that can last for weeks or months.Credit: Saul Loeb/CNP via Zuma Wire

The United States has announced that it will spend big on research into ‘long COVID’ — the long-lasting health effects of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The funding comes as the scientific community is just starting to recognize the impact of the condition and unravel why it occurs. On 23 February, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced an initiative worth US$1.15 billion over four years to fund investigations of the condition, and listed some first priorities.

Symptoms of long COVID are wide-ranging and include fatigue, fevers and shortness of breath, as well as neurological conditions such as anxiety and depression, and an inability to concentrate. They can appear weeks after a SARS-CoV-2 infection and linger for months. The NIH has begun referring to the collection of after-effects as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC.

Some of the NIH PASC Initiative’s main goals are to better understand the biological basis of PASC, and what makes some people more vulnerable to the condition than others — with a view towards eventually finding treatments.

“We do not know yet the magnitude of the problem, but given the number of individuals of all ages who have been or will be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the public health impact could be profound,” NIH director Francis Collins said in a statement announcing the effort. A study1 of 177 people published last month determined that 9 months after infection with SARS-CoV-2, one-third of them were still reporting symptoms such as fatigue. This shows that with more than 115 million COVID-19 infections worldwide so far, the number of people with PASC could be massive.

“Other than the general consensus that the phenomenon is real, all we really know are the questions,” says Steven Deeks, a physician and infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who is leading a project to study people with long-lasting effects from COVID-19.

A fuller picture

One of the first projects the NIH has said it will fund is a recovery-tracking effort. Investigators will collaborate to record the recovery paths of at least 40,000 adults and children with SARS-CoV-2 in a ‘metacohort’, to observe who develops long-term effects and who doesn’t. The metacohort will cover people of all ages, including pregnant people, to help researchers pin down the range of effects that people experience while recovering from an infection.

Such long-term tracking is necessary to gain a fuller picture of the phenomenon, says Carlos del Rio, an epidemiologist and infectious-disease physician at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has called for lengthy longitudinal studies to improve understanding of the disease2.

A separate project will record the effects of COVID-19 on various organ systems by collecting evidence from autopsies. This type of analysis has so far indicated that the disease can destroy tissue in the lungs, as well as other organs — but researchers would like more detailed information. In another effort, the NIH will host a bank of biospecimens such as blood, urine, faeces and cerebrospinal fluid from people with PASC; researchers will be able to access the samples to inform future studies.

Patient perspectives

People who have experienced COVID-19 and its long-term aftermath, including some researchers, have mobilized to argue that better attention should be paid to post-COVID effects.

Such groups are worried about whether and how researchers will take their experience into consideration, says Shobita Parthasarathy, director of the science, technology and policy programme at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “There is a concern among patients that their experience and knowledge won’t be taken seriously — that in the process of becoming a scientific inquiry, their experiences will not be used to guide the understanding of the condition.”

“It’s a confusing and difficult illness to describe if you haven’t had it,” says Hannah Davis, who is one of the leaders of Patient Led Research For COVID-19, an international group of researchers and advocates who themselves have long COVID. “I think that working with patients will facilitate understanding of long COVID much more quickly.” The NIH’s name for the condition, PASC, is more accurate than some others that researchers have proposed, says Davis, but it is a departure from ‘long COVID’, the name that people with the condition have themselves settled on.

So far, the NIH has received $3.6 billion from the US Congress to fund COVID-19-related work and research, in addition to the $1.15 billion for studies of PASC .

In February, the UK National Institute for Health Research announced it was investing £18.5 million (US$25.9 million) to fund four studies of long COVID.

“It is of course impossible to truly understand the long-term consequences of a disease that did not exist a year ago,” says Deeks. “We are doing our best, but this will take time.”

References

1.

Logue, J. K. et al. JAMA Netw. Open 4, e210830 (2021).

2.

Del Rio, C., Collins, L. F. & Malani, P. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 324, 1723–1724 (2020).

Download references

Latest on:

SARS-CoV-2

Public health

An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday.

Related Articles

via Wealth Health