Capitalizing and Compensating: Older Adults’ Religious and Spiritual Uses of Technology

This study explores how older adults use information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their spiritual and religious lives. How widespread is their use? What kinds of ICTS do they use and for what reasons? What impact do they have on their religious and spiritual lives? We explored these questions by collecting interviews with 90 older adults, average age 77, from six major Judeo-Christian faith traditions. The sample was developed from nominations by pastors, priests, and rabbis in three southern California cities. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and analyzed through abductive analysis. Many older adults in our sample reported using ICTs to assist their devotional lives—nine in ten of our participants provided examples, thus dispelling technology as merely a tool for the young to incorporate into their religious lives. An unexpected finding of the research was the wide variety of ICT usage mentioned by these elderly participants —over 15 distinct ones were mentioned.  The reasons for using ICTs fell into two primary categories: compensating for age related changes and capitalizing on unique opportunities for growth in later life. The results demonstrate support for Carstensen’s Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory and have implications for practitioners working with older adults, such as social workers and clergy, as well as for marketers in industry

Identification of the top TESS objects of interest for atmospheric characterization of transiting exoplanets with JWST

Funding: Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. This work makes use of observations from the LCOGT network. Part of the LCOGT telescope time was granted by NOIRLab through the Mid-Scale Innovations Program (MSIP). MSIP is funded by NSF. This paper is based on observations made with the MuSCAT3 instrument, developed by the Astrobiology Center and under financial support by JSPS KAKENHI (grant No. JP18H05439) and JST PRESTO (grant No. JPMJPR1775), at Faulkes Telescope North on Maui, HI, operated by the Las Cumbres Observatory. This paper makes use of data from the MEarth Project, which is a collaboration between Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The MEarth Project acknowledges funding from the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. AST-0807690, AST-1109468, AST-1616624 and AST-1004488 (Alan T. Waterman Award), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. 80NSSC18K0476 issued through the XRP Program, and the John Templeton Foundation. C.M. would like to gratefully acknowledge the entire Dragonfly Telephoto Array team, and Bob Abraham in particular, for allowing their telescope bright time to be put to use observing exoplanets. B.J.H. acknowledges support from the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) program (grant No. 80NSSC20K1551) and support by NASA under grant No. 80GSFC21M0002. K.A.C. and C.N.W. acknowledge support from the TESS mission via subaward s3449 from MIT. D.R.C. and C.A.C. acknowledge support from NASA through the XRP grant No. 18-2XRP18_2-0007. C.A.C. acknowledges that this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). S.Z. and A.B. acknowledge support from the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology (grant No. 3-18143). The research leading to these results has received funding from the ARC grant for Concerted Research Actions, financed by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. TRAPPIST is funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique, FNRS) under the grant No. PDR T.0120.21. The postdoctoral fellowship of K.B. is funded by F.R.S.-FNRS grant No. T.0109.20 and by the Francqui Foundation. H.P.O.'s contribution has been carried out within the framework of the NCCR PlanetS supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant Nos. 51NF40_182901 and 51NF40_205606. F.J.P. acknowledges financial support from the grant No. CEX2021-001131-S funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033. A.J. acknowledges support from ANID—Millennium Science Initiative—ICN12_009 and from FONDECYT project 1210718. Z.L.D. acknowledges the MIT Presidential Fellowship and that this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. 1745302. P.R. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation grant No. 1952545. This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant Nos. JP17H04574, JP18H05439, JP21K20376; JST CREST grant No. JPMJCR1761; and Astrobiology Center SATELLITE Research project AB022006. This publication benefits from the support of the French Community of Belgium in the context of the FRIA Doctoral Grant awarded to M.T. D.D. acknowledges support from TESS Guest Investigator Program grant Nos. 80NSSC22K1353, 80NSSC22K0185, and 80NSSC23K0769. A.B. acknowledges the support of M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University Program of Development. T.D. was supported in part by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. V.K. acknowledges support from the youth scientific laboratory project, topic FEUZ-2020-0038.JWST has ushered in an era of unprecedented ability to characterize exoplanetary atmospheres. While there are over 5000 confirmed planets, more than 4000 Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) planet candidates are still unconfirmed and many of the best planets for atmospheric characterization may remain to be identified. We present a sample of TESS planets and planet candidates that we identify as “best-in-class” for transmission and emission spectroscopy with JWST. These targets are sorted into bins across equilibrium temperature Teq and planetary radius Rp and are ranked by a transmission and an emission spectroscopy metric (TSM and ESM, respectively) within each bin. We perform cuts for expected signal size and stellar brightness to remove suboptimal targets for JWST. Of the 194 targets in the resulting sample, 103 are unconfirmed TESS planet candidates, also known as TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs). We perform vetting and statistical validation analyses on these 103 targets to determine which are likely planets and which are likely false positives, incorporating ground-based follow-up from the TESS Follow-up Observation Program to aid the vetting and validation process. We statistically validate 18 TOIs, marginally validate 31 TOIs to varying levels of confidence, deem 29 TOIs likely false positives, and leave the dispositions for four TOIs as inconclusive. Twenty-one of the 103 TOIs were confirmed independently over the course of our analysis. We intend for this work to serve as a community resource and motivate formal confirmation and mass measurements of each validated planet. We encourage more detailed analysis of individual targets by the community.Peer reviewe

Burnout among surgeons before and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: an international survey

Background: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had many significant impacts within the surgical realm, and surgeons have been obligated to reconsider almost every aspect of daily clinical practice. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study reported in compliance with the CHERRIES guidelines and conducted through an online platform from June 14th to July 15th, 2020. The primary outcome was the burden of burnout during the pandemic indicated by the validated Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure. Results: Nine hundred fifty-four surgeons completed the survey. The median length of practice was 10 years; 78.2% included were male with a median age of 37 years old, 39.5% were consultants, 68.9% were general surgeons, and 55.7% were affiliated with an academic institution. Overall, there was a significant increase in the mean burnout score during the pandemic; longer years of practice and older age were significantly associated with less burnout. There were significant reductions in the median number of outpatient visits, operated cases, on-call hours, emergency visits, and research work, so, 48.2% of respondents felt that the training resources were insufficient. The majority (81.3%) of respondents reported that their hospitals were included in the management of COVID-19, 66.5% felt their roles had been minimized; 41% were asked to assist in non-surgical medical practices, and 37.6% of respondents were included in COVID-19 management. Conclusions: There was a significant burnout among trainees. Almost all aspects of clinical and research activities were affected with a significant reduction in the volume of research, outpatient clinic visits, surgical procedures, on-call hours, and emergency cases hindering the training. Trial registration: The study was registered on clicaltrials.gov "NCT04433286" on 16/06/2020

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Change Your Diet, Cure Your Illness: The Content and Consequences of Chronic Illness Food Blogs

This year, the World Health Organization expects chronic disease to account for 75 percent of all deaths worldwide. The internet is an increasingly popular source of health information for those suffering from chronic illness. Online blogs, numbered at 152 million have become one of the most popular forms of web content. Specifically, healthy food blogs have emerged, enabling experts and non-experts alike to dispense health and diet information to large numbers of people. However, blogging in the social sciences remains an understudied phenomenon. This project studies the messaging of 65 popular chronic illness healthy food blogs and the potential consequences of the messages including the role of race, gender, and socioeconomic status. I find that two narratives persist on the blogs—the failure of western medicine to heal illness and the benefits of altering diet. These narratives result in empowerment through individual agency and community building for the bloggers. The messages on the blogs are also endangering in their individualization of health, side-stepping structural explanations for health. This research demonstrates chronic illness food blogs as sites for examining the dual effect of self-empowerment through health knowledge and the impact of surveillance and policing of their own and others’ bodies

Embodied Resistance: Multiracial Identity, Gender, and the Body

This article explores the importance of the physical body in the development of gendered racial and ethnic identities through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 multiracial/multiethnic women. From a critical mixed race and critical feminist perspective, I argue that the development of an embodied and gendered multiracial and multiethnic identity is a path to questioning and resisting the dominant monoracial order in the United States. Interviews reveal that respondents develop these embodied identities both through understandings of themselves as gendered and raced subjects and through relationships with monoracial individuals. The process by which these women understand their physical bodies as multiracial subjects illustrates a critical embodied component of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States

Assessment of internet addiction among Filipino adolescents from Rizal and Laguna provinces: An item response theory approach

The problematic use of the Internet has become a widespread concern due to its detrimental effects to a person\u27s well-being. The purpose of the current investigation is to examine the psychometric properties of the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) for assessing the relationship between excessive Internet use of the Internet and its manifestations through a representative sample of Filipino adolescents from Rizal and Laguna provinces. This study adapted an Item Response Theory Graded Response Modeling that assessed the reliability of the test at the item and test levels. Analyses of the data revealed that the test is useful in classifying individuals into low, moderate, or high Internet addiction severity levels with prevalence of 10.06%, 83.73%, and 6.21%, respectively. It was also found that the items measured more Internet addiction dimension and with more precision 1SD around the mean. The items which best characterize each severity level were distinguished