The first study to examine both chest X-ray and CT imaging findings in teenagers with electronic (e-)cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury (EVALI) was published today in the journal Radiology.
Read More

Canadian artificial intelligence firm BlueDot has been in the news in recent weeks for warning about the new coronavirus days ahead of the official alerts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. The company was able to do this by tapping different sources of information beyond official statistics about the number of cases reported.
Read More

All over the world, thousands of people have now been infected with the coronavirus. China has seen the highest number of cases thus far, but the virus has also struck in Italy, France, the US, Canada, and Japan. Headlines such as “Coronavirus: how worried should we be?”, and “Corona death toll rises” reflect people’s growing fear of the virus. But is that fear justified? It’s still difficult to answer that question in the short term, given that the disease is a new one. But there’s nothing new about the rampant fear. The cause of this fear lies in various psychological heuristics (underlying principles that influence the choices people make).
Read More

Undetected cases, many of which were likely not severely symptomatic, were largely responsible for the rapid spread of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, according to new research by scientists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The findings, based on a computer model of the outbreak, are published online in medRxiv, a preprint server for health sciences. (Read a Q&A with study co-author Jeffrey Shaman below.)
Read More

Concerns over the spread of the novel coronavirus have translated into an economic slowdown. Stock markets have taken a hit: the UK’s FTSE 100 has seen its worst days of trading for many years and so have the Dow Jones and S&P in the US. Money has to go somewhere and the price of gold—seen as a stable commodity during extreme events – reached a seven-year high.
Read More

In the wake of Australia’s first coronavirus-related death on Sunday, the nation now has just a small window of opportunity to avoid hitting the panic button.
Read More

Our brain is the most complex organ in the body. Not only does it control basic life functions like breathing, organ function, and movement, it’s also behind more complex processes—everything from thought, controlling our behaviour and emotions, and creating memories. But despite how important our brains are, many people still know very little about it.
Read More

A large international team of researchers has conducted a study that involved comparing the structure of the live poultry trade across Chinese provinces with genome sequencing of flu viruses from samples taken from birds in the same provinces. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study and what they found.
Read More

A caesarean birth had little impact on whether a child would go onto develop allergies, a new study led by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) has shown.
Read More

Kent research suggests that men can distinguish between the scents of sexually aroused and non-aroused women.
Read More