It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, September 07, 2023
US adults who don't trust university-based research are less likely to see climate change as an important problem, indicating a need to develop 'a culture of trust'
US adults who don't trust university-based research are less likely to see climate change as an important problem, indicating a need to develop 'a culture of trust'.
Article Title: Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change
Author Countries: UK, USA
Funding: RD’s work is supported by the Quadrature Climate Foundation [01-21-000149] and Keynes Fund [JHVH]. RMA and DE’s work is supported by Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. RD receives salary from the Quadrature Climate Foundation and the Keynes Fund. DE and RMA receive salary from Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Is the burden of anaemia among Indian adolescent women increasing? Evidence from Indian Demographic and Health Surveys (2015–21)
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-Sep-2023
COI STATEMENT
Competing Interests: The authors have read the journal’s policy and have the following competing interest: AS is a member of the PLOS Editorial Board outside of the submitted work. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS policies on sharing data and materials.
Autistic and neurodivergent workers report experiencing unique pressures to mask traits, to avoid negative reactions from colleagues and employers
IMAGE: MANY PEOPLE – PARTICULARLY THOSE WHO ARE NEURODIVERGENT – FEEL PRESSURE TO HIDE ASPECTS OF THEIR IDENTITY AND PERSONALITY IN THE WORKPLACE.view more
CREDIT: THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF DALL·E BY OPEN AI. BRIAN IRVINE OWNS THE IMAGE, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRINT, SELL, AND MERCHANDISE (USAGE RIGHTS IN HTTPS://LABS.OPENAI.COM/ABOUT). THE IMAGE IS DISTRIBUTED UNDER THE CC-BY 4.0 LICENSE (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/).
Autistic and neurodivergent workers report experiencing unique pressures to mask traits, to avoid negative reactions from colleagues and employers
Article Title: The workplace masking experiences of autistic, non-autistic neurodivergent and neurotypical adults in the UK
Author Countries: UK
Funding: The present study was funded by an Autistica research grant (REF: 7263) to AR and BH (https://www.autistica.org.uk/). Research at the UCL Centre for Research in Autism and Education is supported by Pears Foundation (https://pearsfoundation.org.uk/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
The workplace masking experiences of autistic, non-autistic neurodivergent and neurotypical adults in the UK
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-Sep-2023
Medical cannabis use in Australian patients with chronic health issues linked to significant improvements in overall health-related quality of life and fatigue levels
Cannabis therapy also linked to improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain levels—though no changes in sleep disturbance levels reported
IMAGE: CULTIVATION FACILITY OF LITTLE GREEN PHARMA.view more
CREDIT: ARD JONGSMA (HTTPS://STILLWORDS.COM/) AND OWNED BY LITTLE GREEN PHARMA DENMARK, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)
Australian patients with chronic health issues prescribed medical cannabis showed significant improvements in overall health-related quality of life and fatigue in the first three months of use, along with improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain. Interestingly, cannabis therapy did not seem to improve reported sleep disturbances, according to a study published September 6, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Margaret-Ann Tait from the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues.
Since 2016 in Australia, medical cannabis has been approved for prescription to patients with health conditions unresponsive to other treatment. Tait and colleagues surveyed a group of Australians with chronic health conditions prescribed medical cannabis to better understand any changes in patient-reported outcomes following cannabis treatment in this population.
The authors used survey responses from 2327 Australian patients with chronic health issues prescribed medical cannabis (THC and CBD dissolved in a medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) carrier oil) between November 2020 and December 2021. Patients were surveyed about their self-reported health-related quality of life, pain, sleep, anxiety, and depression prior to beginning cannabis therapy, after two weeks of treatment, then once a month for three months.
63 percent of the surveyed patients were female, with an average age of 51 years (range 18-97 years). The most-reported conditions being treated were chronic pain (69 percent); insomnia (23 percent); anxiety (22 percent); and anxiety/depression (11 percent); half of patients were being treated for more than one condition. Patients reported significant, clinically-meaningful improvements in health-related quality of life and fatigue measurements across the three months surveyed. Patients also reported clinically meaningful reductions in pain and significant improvements for moderate-severe anxiety and depression. However, though many patients were prescribed cannabis for insomnia, there were no overall improvements in patient-reported sleep disturbance.
The authors did not measure adverse effects as part of the study, though 30 patients formally withdrew from the study due to “unwanted side effects”. Regardless, these results suggest medical cannabis may be effective in helping manage previously-untreatable chronic conditions. The authors also note that more research and development of the cannabis oil products used in this study may be needed in order to successfully treat patients with insomnia and sleep disorders.
The authors add: “Within the first three months of medicinal cannabis therapy, participants reported improvements in their health-related quality of life, fatigue, and health conditions associated with anxiety, depression, and pain.”
Citation: Tait M-A, Costa DS, Campbell R, Norman R, Warne LN, Schug S, et al. (2023) Health-related quality of life in patients accessing medicinal cannabis in Australia: The QUEST initiative results of a 3-month follow-up observational study. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0290549. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290549
Author Countries: Australia
Funding: The University of Sydney received funding from Little Green Pharma Ltd. to support CR and MT to conduct this study. The funder played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; nor in the decision to submit the article for publication. The study was independently investigator-led and all authors had full access to all data (including statistical reports and tables) in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Health-related quality of life in patients accessing medicinal cannabis in Australia: The QUEST initiative results of a 3-month follow-up observational study
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-Sep-2023
COI STATEMENT
The University of Sydney received funding from Little Green Pharma Pty Ltd. to support MT and CR to conduct the submitted work; LW is a paid employee of Little Green Pharma Pty Ltd.; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
Cannabis-involved traffic injury emergency department visits after cannabis legalization and commercialization
About The Study: This study found large increases in cannabis involvement in emergency department visits for traffic injury over time in Ontario, Canada, which may have accelerated following nonmedical cannabis commercialization. Although the frequency of visits was rare, they may reflect broader changes in cannabis-impaired driving. Greater prevention efforts, including targeted education and policy measures, in regions with legal cannabis are indicated.
Authors: Daniel T. Myran, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
JOURNAL
JAMA Network Open
Commercialization of cannabis linked to increased traffic injuries
Ottawa, ON, September 5, 2023 РAnnual rates of emergency department visits for cannabis-involved traffic injury increased by 475 percent over 13 years, according to a new study from The Ottawa Hospital, Bruy̬re Research Institute, and ICES.
The study examined cannabis-involvement in emergency department (ED) visits for traffic injuries between 2010 and 2021 and looked for changes after the legalization of cannabis in October 2018 and following the commercialization of the legal market (expanded cannabis products and retail stores), which overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our findings highlight a concerning increase in cannabis-involvement in traffic-injury emergency visits over time, with even sharper spikes following the phases of legalization and commercialization,” says lead author and ICES post-doctoral trainee Dr. Daniel Myran, who is also a family physician and fellow at the Bruyère Research Institute and The Ottawa Hospital. “Conversely, alcohol-involvement in traffic injury ED visits did not increase over the study period, which suggests that legalization of cannabis has played an important role in rising rates.”
While documented cannabis-involvement in traffic injuries ED visits were very rare, the data raise concern about potential broader increases in cannabis-impaired driving which may have accelerated after legal market expansion.
Published in JAMA Network Open, the researchers examined medical record data of 947,604 ED visits for traffic in in Ontario, Canada. They included records from January 2010 and December 2021, but excluded ED visits from individuals who were younger than 16 (minimum legal age of driving) at the time of the ED visit.
Key findings include:
The number of cannabis-involved traffic injury ED visits increased significantly. Annual rates of visits surged by 475 percent, from 0.18 visits per 1,000 total motor vehicle collisions in 2010 to 1.01 in 2021.
Legalization of non-medical cannabis with restrictions was associated with a 94 percent increase in the rate of cannabis-involved traffic injury ED visits compared to the pre-legalization period. The subsequent phase of commercialization, which overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, saw an even greater increase of 223 percent in rates compared to the pre-legalization period.
Male sex (assigned at birth), living in lower-income neighborhoods, being aged 19-21, and having a prior cannabis-related ED visit were associated with higher rates of ED visits.
“The observed increase in cannabis-involved traffic injuries might reflect broader trends in cannabis-impaired driving,” says Dr. Myran. “The study highlights the need for enhanced prevention efforts, including targeted education and policy measures.”
One limitation of the study is that ED staff may have been more aware of the potential for cannabis-related traffic injuries after legalization, leading to higher levels of testing for cannabis. The researchers believe that this would not have explained all the observed increase due to the severity of traffic injuries, which would be thoroughly investigated despite policy or testing procedure changes.
The authors caution that it is too soon to understand the impact of cannabis legalization on road safety particularly because of the enormous decline in driving and mobility during the pandemic, which overlapped with much of the legalization period.
The study, “Cannabis-involvement in traffic injury emergency department visits after the legalization and subsequent commercialization of non-medical cannabis” was published in JAMA Network Open.
Author block:Myran DT, Gaudreault A, Pugliese M, Manuel D, Tanuseputro P.
ICES is an independent, non-profit research institute that uses population-based health information to produce knowledge on a broad range of healthcare issues. Our unbiased evidence provides measures of health system performance, a clearer understanding of the shifting healthcare needs of Ontarians, and a stimulus for discussion of practical solutions to optimize scarce resources. ICES knowledge is highly regarded in Canada and abroad and is widely used by government, hospitals, planners, and practitioners to make decisions about care delivery and to develop policy. For the latest ICES news, follow us on Twitter: @ICESOntario
The Bruyère Research Institute supports investigators who contribute to a better, more responsive health care system that delivers the best care to patients, residents, and families. The Institute provides solutions to improve the health and health care of aging and vulnerable Canadians. To learn more, visit http://www.bruyere.org.
The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) is one of Canada’s top learning and research hospitals where we are guided by our vision to provide the world-class and compassionate care we would all want for our loved ones. Our multi-campus hospital, affiliated with the University of Ottawa, is home to the Regional Trauma Centre and Cancer Centre, and to discoveries that are adopted globally. Backed by generous support from the community, we are focused on reshaping the future of health care to improve the health of our diverse population of patients from Eastern Ontario, Western Quebec, and Nunavut. For more information about The Ottawa Hospital, visit OttawaHospital.on.ca.
The University of Ottawa is home to over 50,000 students, faculty and staff, who live, work and study in both French and English. Our campus is a crossroads of cultures and ideas, where bold minds come together to inspire game-changing ideas. We are one of Canada’s top 10 research universities—our professors and researchers explore new approaches to today’s challenges. One of a handful of Canadian universities ranked among the top 200 in the world, we attract exceptional thinkers and welcome diverse perspectives from across the globe. www.uottawa.ca
Cannabis-Involved Traffic Injury Emergency Department Visits After Cannabis Legalization and Commercialization
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-Sep-2023
COI STATEMENT
Dr Myran reported grants from Canadian Institutes of Health Research during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
Experiencing negatively-perceived emotions might prompt people to withdraw from a social group - specifically, shame for individualistic societies, but anger for more collectivistic cultures
Experiencing negatively-perceived emotions might prompt people to withdraw from a social group - specifically, shame for individualistic societies, but anger for more collectivistic cultures
Remembering the order of information is central for a person when participating in conversations, planning everyday life, or undergoing an education. A new study, published in the scientific journal PLoS One, shows that this ability is probably human unique. Even the closest relatives of humans, such as bonobos, do not learn order in the same way.
“The study contributes another piece of the puzzle to the question of how the mental abilities of humans and other animals differ, and why only humans speak languages, plan space travel, and have learned to exploit the earth so efficiently that we now pose a serious threat to countless other life forms”, says Johan Lind, associate professor in ethology and deputy director at the Center for Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University. Since September also associate professor of ethology at Linköping University.
Already earlier research at Stockholm University has suggested that only humans have the ability to recognize and remember so-called sequential information, and that this ability is a fundamental building block underlying unique human cultural abilities. But previously, this sequence memory-hypothesis has not been tested in humans' closest relatives, the great apes. The new experiments now show that also bonobos, one of the great apes, struggle to learn the order of stimuli.
In the recently published book The Human Evolutionary Transition: From Animal Intelligence to Culture (Princeton University Press), ethologists Magnus Enquist and Johan Lind at Stockholm University, and Stefano Ghirlanda, researcher in psychology at Brooklyn College, New York, have launched a new theory for how humans became cultural beings. A central idea concerns the difference in how humans and other animals recognize and remember sequential information.
“We have previously analyzed a large number of studies that suggest that only humans recognize and remember sequential information faithfully. But, even though we analyzed data from a number of mammals and birds, including monkeys, there has been a lack of information from our closest relatives, the other great apes”, says Johan Lind.
In a series of experiments, memory abilities of bonobos and humans were tested by having them press computer screens to, among other things, learn to distinguish between short sequences, including pressing right if a yellow square comes before a blue square, or by pressing to the left of the blue square appears before the yellow square.
“The study shows that bonobos forget that they have seen a blue square already five to 10 seconds after it has disappeared from the screen, and that they have great difficulty learning to distinguish the sequences blue-square-before-yellow-square from yellow-square- before-blue-square, even though they have been trained for thousands of trials”, says Vera Vinken, associated with Stockholm University, now a PhD student in Great Britain at the Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University.
In contrast, the study shows that humans learned to distinguish the short sequences nearly immediately. However, it still remains to be shown exactly how our closest relatives can remember and use sequential information.
“We now know that our closest relatives do not share the same sequential mental abilities with humans. But even if the results indicate that their working memory works in principle in the same way as in rats and pigeons, no one has yet demonstrated this in practice”, says Magnus Enquist, professor emeritus and one of the founders of the Center for Cultural Evolution.
The new results provide further support for the sequence memory-hypothesis, that during human prehistory an ability to remember and process sequences evolved, a necessary mechanism for many uniquely human phenomena such as language, planning ability and sequential thinking.
JOURNAL
PLoS ONE
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-Sep-2023
Grasping entropy: Teachers and students investigate thermodynamics through a hands-on model
Simple model uses everyday materials like dice and buttons to effectively demonstrate the concept of entropy to students.
IMAGE: THIS HANDS-ON MODEL LEVERAGES KNOWN CONDITIONS OF A SIMPLE SYSTEM OF HARD PARTICLES TO DEMONSTRATE HOW ENTROPY IS RELATED TO THE NUMBER OF ACCESSIBLE MICROSTATES BY OBSERVING THE DEGREES OF FREEDOM AVAILABLE TO EACH PARTICLE.view more
CREDIT: T. RYAN ROGERS
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6, 2023 – Though a cornerstone of thermodynamics, entropy remains one of the most vexing concepts to teach budding physicists in the classroom. As a result, many people oversimplify the concept as the amount of disorder in the universe, neglecting its underlying quantitative nature.
In The Physics Teacher, co-published by AIP Publishing and the American Association of Physics Teachers, researcher T. Ryan Rogers designed a hand-held model to demonstrate the concept of entropy for students. Using everyday materials, Rogers’ approach allows students to confront the topic with new intuition — one that takes specific aim at the confusion between entropy and disorder.
“It’s a huge conceptual roadblock,” Rogers said. “The good news is that we’ve found that it’s something you can correct relatively easily early on. The bad news is that this misunderstanding gets taught so early on.”
While many classes opt for the imperfect, qualitative shorthand of calling entropy “disorder,” it’s defined mathematically as the number of ways energy can be distributed in a system. Such a definition merely requires students to understand how particles store energy, formally known as "degrees of freedom."
To tackle the problem, Rogers developed a model in which small objects such as dice and buttons are poured into a box, replicating a simple thermodynamic system. Some particles in the densely filled box are packed in place, meaning they have fewer degrees of freedom, leading to an overall low-entropy system.
As students shake the box, they introduce energy into the system, which loosens up locked-in particles. This increases the overall number of ways energy can be distributed within the box.
“You essentially zoom in on entropy so students can say, ‘Aha! There is where I saw the entropy increase,’” Rogers said.
As students shake further, the particles settle into a configuration that more evenly portions out the energy among them. The catch: at this point of high entropy, the particles fall into an orderly alignment.
“Even though it looks more orientationally ordered, there’s actually higher entropy,” Rogers said.
All the students who participated in the lesson were able to reason to the correct definition of entropy after the experiment.
Next, Rogers plans to extend the reach of the model by starting a conversation about entropy with other educators and creating a broader activity guide for ways to use the kits for kindergarten through college. He hopes his work inspires others to clarify the distinction in their classrooms, even if by DIY means.
“Grapes and Cheez-It crackers are very effective, as well,” Rogers said.
The article, "Hands-on Model for Investigating Entropy and Disorder in the Classroom," is authored by T. Ryan Rogers. It will appear in The Physics Teacher on Sept. 6, 2023 (DOI: 10.1119/5.0089761). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0089761.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Dedicated to the strengthening of the teaching of introductory physics at all levels, The Physics Teacher includes tutorial papers, articles on pedagogy, current research, and news in physics, as well as history, philosophy, and biography. See https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/pte.
About AAPT
AAPT is an international organization for physics educators, physicists, and industrial scientists with members worldwide. Dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of physics through teaching, AAPT provides awards, publications, and programs that encourage teaching practical application of physics principles, support continuing professional development, and reward excellence in physics education. AAPT was founded in 1930 and is headquartered in the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland.
