International Conference on Science, Health and Engineering

Some countries with national health insurance plans face a basic problem: Not enough people sign up for those programs, and the ones who do tend to have worse-than-average health. That is a public health matter, but also a fiscal issue. When more healthy people enroll in health care plans, and thus pay premiums, those plans gain a better fiscal footing. What’s a good way to address this challenge? A recently published study in Indonesia led by MIT economists yields new insights, which could apply globally. The study involves a three-pronged experiment in which people received either encouragement to enroll through subsidies, assistance with the signup process, or information about the program’s benefits. For starters, full subsidies for program participants increased enrollment by 18.6 percentage points, the experiment revealed. “We do find that subsidies make a difference,” says Benjamin Olken, an MIT economist and co-author of the paper detailing the experiment’s results. But ...

I don’t have more free time. I have felt burnt out, compelled to refrain from complaining about doing schoolwork, about loss of income, about living alone, about how to process change. My losses could be worse, I sometimes feel guilty for even comparing to those who have experienced the death of loved ones. I have to remind myself that my problems are real, my feelings are valid, my pain does matter. I’m still trying to give myself the permission and room to grieve those losses. The National Covid Memorial Wall, London (Image Credit: Kelly Foster, via Wikimedia Commons). This poem is inspired by recent research , which has investigated how young adults have coped with loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. Shadow loss is any type of loss where there is no dead body present. The term was coined by the researcher Cole Imperi, who created the word in order to fill the gap in the English language for how certain kinds of loss can be described. In relation to COVID-...

Many Covid-19 patients have reported symptoms affecting the ears, including hearing loss and tinnitus. Dizziness and balance problems can also occur, suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be able to infect the inner ear. A new study from MIT and Massachusetts Eye and Ear provides evidence that the virus can indeed infect cells of the inner ear, including hair cells, which are critical for both hearing and balance. The researchers also found that the pattern of infection seen in human inner ear tissue is consistent with the symptoms seen in a study of 10 Covid-19 patients who reported a variety of ear-related symptoms. The researchers used novel cellular models of the human inner ear that they developed, as well as hard-to-obtain adult human inner ear tissue, for their studies. The limited availability of such tissue has hindered previous studies of Covid-19 and other viruses that can cause hearing loss. “Having the models is the first step, and this work opens a path now for w...

Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have designed a way to selectively turn on gene therapies in target cells, including human cells. Their technology can detect specific messenger RNA sequences in cells, and that detection then triggers production of a specific protein from a transgene, or artificial gene. Because transgenes can have negative and even dangerous effects when expressed in the wrong cells, the researchers wanted to find a way to reduce off-target effects from gene therapies. One way of distinguishing different types of cells is by reading the RNA sequences inside them, which differ from tissue to tissue. By finding a way to produce transgene only after “reading” specific RNA sequences inside cells, the researchers developed a technology that could fine-tune gene therapies in applications ranging from regenerative medicine to cancer treatment. For example, researchers could potentially create new therapies to destroy tumors by designing their system to identify...

Since its first recorded sighting by European explorers in the 1600s, scientists and historians have believed that Europeans were the first people to ever set foot on the Falkland Islands. Findings from a new University of Maine-led study, however, suggests otherwise; that human activity on the islands predates European arrival by centuries. Kit Hamley, National Science Foundation graduate research fellow with the UMaine Climate Change Institute, spearheaded the first-ever scientific investigation into prehistoric human presence on the Southern Atlantic archipelago. She and her team collected animal bones, charcoal records and other evidence from across the islands over multiple expeditions and examined them for indications of human activity using radiocarbon dating and other laboratory techniques. One notable sign of pre-European human activity derived from a 8,000-year-old charcoal record collected from a column of peat on New Island, located in the southwestern edge of the territ...

A new study shows that in the last two decades the death rate from Parkinson’s disease has risen about 63% in the United States. The research is published in the October 27, 2021, online issue of Neurology ® , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology . The study also found that the death rate was twice as high in men as in women, and there was a higher death rate in white people than other racial/ethnic groups. “ We know that people are living longer and the general population is getting older, but that doesn’t fully explain the increase we saw in the death rate in people with Parkinson’s,” study author Wei Bao, MD, PhD, who conducted the research at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “Understanding why more people are dying from this disease is critical if we are going to reverse the trend.” The study looked at a national death registry that included 479,059 people who died of Parkinson’s between 1999 and 2019. After adjusting for age, researchers found that the...

When given cash with no strings attached, low- and middle-income parents increased their spending on their children, according to Washington State University research. The study, published in the journal Social Forces , also found that the additional funding had little impact on child-related expenditures of high-income parents. For the study, WSU sociologist Mariana Amorim analyzed spending by recipients of the Alaska Permanent Fund payments. Funded by state oil revenues, the fund is the closest program in the United States to a universal basic income. Every resident in Alaska receives a payment called a dividend; the total amount varies each year, but during the time span of this study, 1996-2015, payments averaged around $1,812 a person, or $7,248 for a four-person family, when adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars. Amorim found that after the lump sum payments, low- and middle-income parents made more education, clothing, recreation and electronic purchases for their children. ...

When testing hypotheses on how horses synchronize their herd behavior, computational modeling is a must. So much more is happening among the many mares, stallions, and foals that simple math equations cannot fathom. “Much like human societies, horses have a much more complex society than most birds or fish, for which there are many successful studies in making behavioral models,” explains research leader Tamao Maeda. In the social structure of feral horses, small stable unit groups aggregate into a larger social organization called a “herd”. This is analogous to human families gathering to form a local community, which further combine to form higher social units from cities to countries. The problem is the animal’s virtual size, both in terms of its group population and the vastness of their distribution. The relative scarcity in their behavioral synchronization studies may be due to such challenges in observing the macroscopic structure of feral horses. The joint team from Strasb...

A new review of current literature, conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, has found that irregular responses in the brain to challenging tasks and mistakes could be key to understanding common links between abnormal behaviours in a range of mental illness and cognitive disorders. The researchers reviewed studies that measured brief electrical tremors – naturally occurring electrical vibrations produced in areas at the front of the brain – using EEG, an electrophysiological monitoring method to record electrical activity on the scalp. By collating the findings from the studies they found that brain waves, known as ‘theta activity’, in people with conditions like anxiety, OCD, and ADHD are different following mistakes or challenging situations compared to the theta activity in those without any disorders. The results, published today in Biological Psychiatry, show that disorders like anxiety, OCD and ADHD are strongly...

The high-contrast pattern of giant pandas helps them blend in with their natural environment. Researchers at the University of Bristol , Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Jyväskylä have used state-of-the art image analysis techniques to demonstrate, counterintuitively, that the unique colourings work to disguise the giant panda. The results have been published today in Scientific Reports . While most mammals are drab browns and greys, there are a small number of well-known and intriguing exceptions such as zebras, skunks, and orcas. Perhaps the most famous of all however is the giant panda. The international team analysed rare photographs of the giant pandas, taken in their natural environment. They discovered that their black pelage patches blend in with dark shades and tree trunks, whereas their white patches match foliage and snow when present. Also, infrequent pale brown pelage tones match ground colour, providing an intermediate colour which bridges t...

Even galaxies don’t like to be alone. While astronomers have known for a while that galaxies tend to congregate in groups and clusters, the process of going from formation to friend groups has remained an open question in cosmology. In a  paper  published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Journal, an international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a group of objects that appear to be an emerging accumulation of galaxies in the making – known as a protocluster. “This discovery is an important step toward reaching our ultimate goal: understanding the assembly of galaxy clusters, the most massive structures that exist in the universe,” said  Brenda Frye , an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona’s  Steward Observatory  and a co-author of the study. The Milky Way, home to our solar system, belongs to a galaxy cluster known as the Local Group, which in turn is a part of the Virgo supercluster. But what did a supercluster such...

Humans carry around with them, often abundantly so, at least two kinds of fat tissue: white and brown. White fat cells are essentially inert containers for energy stored in the form of a single large, oily droplet. Brown fat cells are more complex, containing multiple, smaller droplets intermixed with dark-colored mitochondria — cellular organelles that give them their color and are the “engines” that convert the lipid droplets into heat and energy. Some people also have “beige” fat cells, brown-like cells residing within white fat that can be activated to burn energy. In recent years, there has been much effort to find ways to increase brown or beige fat cell activity, to induce fat cells, known as adipocytes, to burn energy and generate heat in a process called thermogenesis as a means to treat obesity, type 2 diabetes and other conditions. But the therapeutic potential of brown fat — and perhaps beige fat cells —has been stymied by the complexity of the processes involved. It wa...

Once the stress of a cancer diagnosis and its intensive treatments have passed, the hope is that life can return to normal. But we know that this is not true for many people who have had treatments for cancer, and sleep is often impacted for a long time after treatment. Researchers at the  American Cancer Society  studied responses from 1,903 cancer survivors from across the U.S. These survivors were diagnosed with cancers such as breast cancer or prostate cancer about nine years before the study. As part of the research, these cancer survivors were asked questions about their sleep and cancer history, and their overall physical, mental, and social health. Even though these men and women had been diagnosed with cancer almost a decade ago, a staggering 51 percent reported that  their sleep had been disturbed  over the prior month. Why do sleep problems continue after cancer? Findings suggest that the residual effects of cancer may continue to negatively affect a ...

A decades-long experiment to search for a new particle called the sterile neutrino has been dealt a blow, according to four analyses conducted by a bevy of scientists, including University of Michigan physicists. New results from the MicroBooNE experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show no sign of the sterile neutrino, a proposed particle that has remained a promising explanation for anomalies seen in earlier physics experiments. Finding a new particle would be a major discovery and a radical shift in our understanding of the universe. However, the four complementary analyses released by the international MicroBooNE collaboration and presented during a seminar today all did not find evidence of the sterile neutrino. Instead, the results align with the Standard Model of Particle Physics, scientists’ best theory of how the universe works. The data is consistent with what the Standard Model predicts: three kinds of neutrinos—no more, no les...

A man’s claim to be the great-grandson of legendary Native American leader Sitting Bull has been confirmed using DNA extracted from Sitting Bull’s scalp lock. This is the first time ancient DNA has been used to confirm a familial relationship between living and historical individuals. The confirmation was made possible using a new method to analyse family lineages using ancient DNA fragments, developed by a team of scientists led by Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre. The results are published today in the journal Science Advances . The technique searches for ‘autosomal DNA’ in the genetic fragments extracted from a body sample. Since we inherit half of our autosomal DNA from our father and half from our mother, this means genetic matches can be checked irrespective of whether an ancestor is on the father or mother’s side of the family. Autosomal DNA from Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull’s scalp lock was compared to D...