Authors examine the impact of environmental noise on cognitive processes in teenagers, focusing on five different noise conditions: two types of noise (aircraft and construction) at two different decibel levels (30 dBA and 60 dBA) and a quiet condition.
The authors looked at whether youth use of marijuana related to later high-risk drug use. Using survey data from 2010-2019 they found that youth marijuana use did correlate to an increased risk of high-risk drug use.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is characterized by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and inattention. The authors hypothesized that people with ADHD would display more inattentional blindness in perceptually simple tasks and less inattentional blindness in perceptually complex tasks. The results indicate that there is no significant correlation between ADHD and inattentional blindness in either type of task.
Although there has been great progress in the field of Natural language processing (NLP) over the last few years, particularly with the development of attention-based models, less research has contributed towards modeling keystroke log data. State of the art methods handle textual data directly and while this has produced excellent results, the time complexity and resource usage are quite high for such methods. Additionally, these methods fail to incorporate the actual writing process when assessing text and instead solely focus on the content. Therefore, we proposed a framework for modeling textual data using keystroke-based features. Such methods pay attention to how a document or response was written, rather than the final text that was produced. These features are vastly different from the kind of features extracted from raw text but reveal information that is otherwise hidden. We hypothesized that pairing efficient machine learning techniques with keystroke log information should produce results comparable to transformer techniques, models which pay more or less attention to the different components of a text sequence in a far quicker time. Transformer-based methods dominate the field of NLP currently due to the strong understanding they display of natural language. We showed that models trained on keystroke log data are capable of effectively evaluating the quality of writing and do it in a significantly shorter amount of time compared to traditional methods. This is significant as it provides a necessary fast and cheap alternative to increasingly larger and slower LLMs.
This study is a cross-sectional survey of adolescents in Basra, Iraq, from November 2020 to March 2021 about types of adolescent problems, the individuals and institutions adolescents turn to, and the role of public health centers in dealing with their problems. The survey found that psychological problems represent the largest proportion of health problems, and most adolescents turn to their parents to discuss their problems. The work indicates that there is an urgent need to pay attention to public health centers and provide health and psychological support to adolescents.
As cancer continues to take millions of lives worldwide, the need to create effective therapeutics for the disease persists. The kinesin Eg5 assembly motor protein is a promising target for cancer therapeutics as inhibition of this protein leads to cell cycle arrest. Monastrol, a small dihydropyrimidine-based molecule capable of inhibiting the kinesin Eg5 function, has attracted the attention of medicinal chemists with its potency, affinity, and specificity to the highly targeted loop5/α2/α3 allosteric binding pocket. In this work, we employed high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) to identify potential small molecule Eg5 inhibitors from a designed set of novel dihydropyrimidine analogs structurally similar to monastrol.
Industrialization has transformed human life and improved it for many. Nonetheless, a side effect has been an increase in chemical waste, which when not disposed of properly, has detrimental effects on surrounding habitats. An increase in ocean acidification could potentially affect many forms of life, disrupting the ecological balance in unforeseeable ways. In this article the authors explore the effect of acidification on corals and shells, and observe that an increase in ocean acidity has a significant effect on corals, but not shells. This illustrates how acidification could negatively affect marine life, and calls our attention to managing the factors that contribute to increasing the pH of the Earth's water bodies.
The study explores how music and sports impact cognitive development in young children, particularly in relation to learning disorders like ADHD and dyslexia.
In this study, the authors investigate an alternative way to kill bacteria other than the use of antibiotics, which is useful when considering antibiotic-resistance bacteria. They use bacteriophages, which are are viruses that can infect bacteria, and measure cell lysis. They make some important findings that these bacteriophage can lyse both antibiotic-resistant and non-resistant bacteria.