Browse Articles

This study examined how social determinants of health (SDH) relate to vision loss by analyzing publicly available data from 18 northern and southern U.S. states and using Bayesian correlation analysis.

The authors looked at developing a PMMA nanoparticle fabric dye that would be more sustainable compared to traditional fabric dyes. They were able to create PMMA based dyes in different colors that were also durable (i.e., did not fade quickly on fabric).

Powered by the sociological framework that exposure to television bleeds into social biases, limiting media representation of women and minority groups may lead to real-world implications and manifestations of racial and gender disparities. To address this phenomenon, the researchers in this article take a look at primetime fictional representation of minorities and women as lawyers and physicians and compare television representation to census data of the same groups within real-world legal and medical occupations. The authors maintain the hypothesis that representation of female and minority groups as television lawyers and doctors is lower than that of their white male counterparts relative to population demographics - a trend that they expect to also be reflected in actual practice. With fictional racial and gender inequalities and corresponding real-world trends highlighted within this article, the researchers call for address towards representation biases that reinforce each other in both fictional and non-fictional spheres.

Bacterial infection is resurging as one of the most dangerous challenges facing the medical establishment. Americans spend about 55 to 70 billion dollars per year on antibiotics, yet these antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective as illness-causing bacteria gain resistance to the prescribed drugs. We tested if 11 commonly-used spices could inhibit growth of the gram-negative bacteria, E. coli, the main takeaway from these experiments is that certain spices and herbs have antibacterial effects that inhibit growth of E.coli , and these spices could show similarly promising activity towards other bacteria.

Inherent bias is often the unconscious driver of human behavior, and the first step towards overcoming these biases is our awareness of them. In this article the authors investigate whether race, gender or species affect the choice of charity by middle class Spaniards. Their conclusions serve as a starting point for further studies that could help charities refine their campaigns in light of these biases effectively transcending them or taking advantage of them to improve their fundraising attempts.

One important factor that contributes to human cancers is accumulated damage to cells' DNA due to the oxidative stress caused by free radicals. In this study, the authors investigate the effects of several different tea leaf extracts on oxidative stress in cultured human prostate cells to see if antioxidants in the tea leaves could help protect cells from this type of DNA damage. They found that all four types of tea extract (as well as direct application of the antioxidant EGCG) improved the outcomes for the cultured cells, with white tea extract having the strongest effect. This research suggests that tea extracts and the antioxidants that they contain may have applications in the treatment of the many diseases associated with cellular DNA damage, including cancer.

The authors analyzed racial and ethnic representation in studies on PFAS and neurological health outcomes.

This article helps in understanding the effect of various social determinants on maternal mortality in the United States. It explains the relationship between maternal mortality rates and factors like race, income, education, and health insurance access.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between colorism and police killings of unarmed African American suspects. The authors collected data from the Washington Post database, which reports unarmed African American victims from 2015–2021, and found that the victims who were killed by police were darker on average than a control population of African Americans that had not encountered the police.

Triggered largely by the warming and pollution of oceans, corals are experiencing bleaching and a variety of diseases caused by the spread of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Identification of bleached/diseased corals enables implementation of measures to halt or retard disease. Benthic cover analysis, a standard metric used in large databases to assess live coral cover, as a standalone measure of reef health is insufficient for identification of coral bleaching/disease. Proposed herein is a solution that couples machine learning with crowd-sourced data – images from government archives, citizen science projects, and personal images collected by tourists – to build a model capable of identifying healthy, bleached, and/or diseased coral.