77 research outputs found
Complexity of the Online Distrust Ecosystem and its Evolution
Collective human distrust (and its associated mis-disinformation) is one of
the most complex phenomena of our time. e.g. distrust of medical expertise, or
climate change science, or democratic election outcomes, and even distrust of
fact-checked events in the current Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia conflicts.
So what makes the online distrust ecosystem so resilient? How has it evolved
during and since the pandemic? And how well have Facebook mitigation policies
worked during this time period? We analyze a Facebook network of interconnected
in-built communities (Facebook pages) totaling roughly 100 million users who
pre-pandemic were just focused on distrust of vaccines. Mapping out this
dynamical network from 2019 to 2023, we show that it has quickly self-healed in
the wake of Facebook's mitigation campaigns which include shutdowns. This
confirms and extends our earlier finding that Facebook's ramp-ups during COVID
were ineffective (e.g. November 2020). Our findings show that future
interventions must be chosen to resonate across multiple topics and across
multiple geographical scales. Unlike many recent studies, our findings do not
rely on third-party black-box tools whose accuracy for rigorous scientific
research is unproven, hence raising doubts about such studies' conclusions, nor
is our network built using fleeting hyperlink mentions which have questionable
relevance
Rise of post-pandemic resilience across the distrust ecosystem
Why is distrust (e.g. of medical expertise) now flourishing online despite
the surge in mitigation schemes being implemented? We analyze the changing
discourse in the Facebook ecosystem of approximately 100 million users who
pre-pandemic were focused on (dis)trust of vaccines. We find that
post-pandemic, their discourse strongly entangles multiple non-vaccine topics
and geographic scales both within and across communities. This gives the
current distrust ecosystem a unique system-level resistance to mitigations that
target a specific topic and geographic scale -- which is the case of many
current schemes due to their funding focus, e.g. local health not national
elections. Backed up by detailed numerical simulations, our results reveal the
following counterintuitive solutions for implementing more effective mitigation
schemes at scale: shift to 'glocal' messaging by (1) blending particular sets
of distinct topics (e.g. combine messaging about specific diseases with climate
change) and (2) blending geographic scales
Adaptive link dynamics drive online hate networks and their mainstream influence
Online hate is dynamic, adaptive -- and is now surging armed with AI/GPT
tools. Its consequences include personal traumas, child sex abuse and violent
mass attacks. Overcoming it will require knowing how it operates at scale. Here
we present this missing science and show that it contradicts current thinking.
Waves of adaptive links connect the hate user base over time across a sea of
smaller platforms, allowing hate networks to steadily strengthen, bypass
mitigations, and increase their direct influence on the massive neighboring
mainstream. The data suggests 1 in 10 of the global population have recently
been exposed, including children. We provide governing dynamical equations
derived from first principles. A tipping-point condition predicts more frequent
future surges in content transmission. Using the U.S. Capitol attack and a 2023
mass shooting as illustrations, we show our findings provide abiding insights
and quantitative predictions down to the hourly scale. The expected impacts of
proposed mitigations can now be reliably predicted for the first time
The First Plasmodium vivax Relapses of Life Are Usually Genetically Homologous
In a prospective infant cohort, 21 infants developed Plasmodium vivax malaria during their first year. Twelve of their mothers also had vivax malaria in the corresponding pregnancies or postpartum period. The genotypes of the maternal and infant infections were all different. Eight of the 12 mothers and 9 of the 21 infants had recurrent infections. Relapse parasite genotypes were different to the initial infection in 13 of 20 (65%) mothers compared with 5 of 24 (21%) infants (P = .02). The first P. vivax relapses of life are usually genetically homologous, whereas relapse in adults may result from activation of heterologous latent hypnozoites acquired from previous inoculations
Spatiotemporal patterns and environmental drivers of human echinococcoses over a twenty-year period in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China
Background
Human cystic (CE) and alveolar (AE) echinococcoses are zoonotic parasitic diseases that can be influenced by environmental variability and change through effects on the parasites, animal intermediate and definitive hosts, and human populations. We aimed to assess and quantify the spatiotemporal patterns of human echinococcoses in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (NHAR), China between January 1994 and December 2013, and examine associations between these infections and indicators of environmental variability and change, including large-scale landscape regeneration undertaken by the Chinese authorities.
Methods
Data on the number of human echinococcosis cases were obtained from a hospital-based retrospective survey conducted in NHAR for the period 1 January 1994 through 31 December 2013. High-resolution imagery from Landsat 4/5-TM and 8-OLI was used to create single date land cover maps. Meteorological data were also collected for the period January 1980 to December 2013 to derive time series of bioclimatic variables. A Bayesian spatio-temporal conditional autoregressive model was used to quantify the relationship between annual cases of CE and AE and environmental variables.
Results
Annual CE incidence demonstrated a negative temporal trend and was positively associated with winter mean temperature at a 10-year lag. There was also a significant, nonlinear effect of annual mean temperature at 13-year lag. The findings also revealed a negative association between AE incidence with temporal moving averages of bareland/artificial surface coverage and annual mean temperature calculated for the period 11–15 years before diagnosis and winter mean temperature for the period 0–4 years. Unlike CE risk, the selected environmental covariates accounted for some of the spatial variation in the risk of AE.
Conclusions
The present study contributes towards efforts to understand the role of environmental factors in determining the spatial heterogeneity of human echinococcoses. The identification of areas with high incidence of CE and AE may assist in the development and refinement of interventions for these diseases, and enhanced environmental change risk assessment
Intratumoral heterogeneity and clonal evolution in liver cancer
Clonal evolution of a tumor ecosystem depends on different selection pressures that are principally immune and treatment mediated. We integrate RNA-seq, DNA sequencing, TCR-seq and SNP array data across multiple regions of liver cancer specimens to map spatio-temporal interactions between cancer and immune cells. We investigate how these interactions reflect intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) by correlating regional neo-epitope and viral antigen burden with the regional adaptive immune response. Regional expression of passenger mutations dominantly recruits adaptive responses as opposed to hepatitis B virus and cancer-testis antigens. We detect different clonal expansion of the adaptive immune system in distant regions of the same tumor. An ITH-based gene signature improves single-biopsy patient survival predictions and an expression survey of 38,553 single cells across 7 regions of 2 patients further reveals heterogeneity in liver cancer. These data quantify transcriptomic ITH and how the different components of the HCC ecosystem interact during cancer evolution
Defensin-Like ZmES4 Mediates Pollen Tube Burst in Maize via Opening of the Potassium Channel KZM1
Species-preferential osmotic pollen tube burst and sperm discharge in maize involve induced opening of the pollen tube-expressed potassium channel KZM1 by the egg apparatus-derived defensin-like protein ZmES4
Formation of the Isthmus of Panama
The formation of the Isthmus of Panama stands as one of the greatest natural events of the Cenozoic, driving profound biotic transformations on land and in the oceans. Some recent studies suggest that the Isthmus formed manymillions of years earlier than the widely recognized age of approximately 3 million years ago (Ma), a result that if true would revolutionize our understanding of environmental, ecological, and evolutionary change across the Americas. To bring clarity to the question of when the Isthmus of Panama formed, we provide an exhaustive review and reanalysis of geological, paleontological, and molecular records. These independent lines of evidence converge upon a cohesive narrative of gradually emerging land and constricting seaways,withformationof theIsthmus of Panama sensustricto around 2.8 Ma. The evidence used to support an older isthmus is inconclusive, and we caution against the uncritical acceptance of an isthmus before the Pliocene.Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Muse
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Genome-wide association study of Tourette Syndrome
Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a developmental disorder that has one of the highest familial recurrence rates among neuropsychiatric diseases with complex inheritance. However, the identification of definitive TS susceptibility genes remains elusive. Here, we report the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) of TS in 1285 cases and 4964 ancestry-matched controls of European ancestry, including two European-derived population isolates, Ashkenazi Jews from North America and Israel, and French Canadians from Quebec, Canada. In a primary meta-analysis of GWAS data from these European ancestry samples, no markers achieved a genome-wide threshold of significance (p<5 × 10−8); the top signal was found in rs7868992 on chromosome 9q32 within COL27A1 (p=1.85 × 10−6). A secondary analysis including an additional 211 cases and 285 controls from two closely-related Latin-American population isolates from the Central Valley of Costa Rica and Antioquia, Colombia also identified rs7868992 as the top signal (p=3.6 × 10−7 for the combined sample of 1496 cases and 5249 controls following imputation with 1000 Genomes data). This study lays the groundwork for the eventual identification of common TS susceptibility variants in larger cohorts and helps to provide a more complete understanding of the full genetic architecture of this disorder
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