Publisher Health

Increased air pollution in recent years has not only contributed to deteriorating environmental conditions in cities across the globe. It has also exacerbated health risks for the people who populate them, particularly those who suffer from pulmonary diseases, such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These dynamics underscore the importance of work to increase the efficacy of drug delivery devices, such as inhalers, that administer active pharmaceutical ingredients to treat respiratory illnesses.
In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from India and Australia describe the results of their collaboration in developing a computational evaluation of drug delivery through both pressurized metered-dose inhalers and dry powder inhalers to determine how the process can be improved.
While inhalers have revolutionized the treatment of pulmonary diseases in the last few decades and are currently being used to administer drugs to patients infected by the COVID-19 virus, “their efficacy remains a great concern as only one-third of the total drug reaches the affected regions of the lungs,” said co-author Suvash C. Saha, from the University of Technology Sydney. “As a result, the drug loss and cost of the treatment become higher.”
Knowing an ability to predict aerosolized or powdered drug deposition in the lungs is vital to better understand targeted drug delivery, Saha and colleagues at the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, in India, created a computational model to evaluate where improvements can be made.
“At higher flow rates, inertial impaction is found to be responsible for deposition of drug particles in the upper portion of the airways but with lesser availability of drug particles in the distal region of the airways,” said co-author Akshoy Ranjan Paul. “Additionally, at lower flow rates, there is not enough momentum to carry particles to the distal region. As a result, there should be an optimum flow rate [to achieve] maximum reach of drug particles in the distal region.”
The researchers present a computational investigation of inhalation rates and drug particle sizes in a realistic human lung model. Using computation fluid dynamics, the study reveals that more drug particles are deposited in the right bronchi than in the left bronchi, which is relatively curved due its proximity to the heart. Key findings suggest the drugs should contain smaller-sized particles to enable their reach in the distal bronchi.
The research “is a notable example that demonstrates how the understanding of fluid mechanics, and the power of computational fluid dynamics, can inform more effective design of drugs and drug-administering devices,” said Saha.
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Materials provided by American Institute of Physics. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

It is well known that fat cells can influence our sensitivity to insulin. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that there are three different subtypes of mature fat cells in white adipose tissue and that it is only one of these, called AdipoPLIN, that responds to insulin. The findings may be relevant for future treatments of metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes.
“These findings increase our knowledge about the function of fat tissue,” says co-corresponding author Niklas Mejhert, researcher at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, at Karolinska Institutet. “They show that the overall capacity of fat tissue to respond to insulin is determined by the proportion and function of a specific fat cell subtype. This could have implications for diseases such as obesity, insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes.”
In the study, which is published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the researchers identified 18 cell classes that forms clusters in white adipose tissue in humans. Of these, three constituted mature fat cells with distinct phenotypes.
To test if the fat cell subtypes were linked to any specific function, the researchers examined in part how these subtypes in four people reacted to short-term increases in insulin levels. The result showed that insulin activated the gene expression in the subtype AdipoPLIN but did not materially affect the other two subtypes. Additionally, the response to insulin stimulation was proportional to the individual’s whole-body insulin sensitivity.
“Our findings challenge the current view of insulin resistance as a generally reduced response to insulin in the fat cells,” says Mikael Rydén, professor in the same department and another of the study’s co-corresponding authors. “Instead, our study suggests that insulin resistance, and possibly type 2 diabetes, could be due to changes in a specific subtype of fat cells. This shows that fat tissue is a much more complex tissue than previously thought. Like muscle tissue, people have several types of fat cells with different functions, which opens up for future interventions targeted at different fat cell types.”
In the study, the Rydén and Mejhert group used a special technique called spatial transcriptomics, which was developed by among others collaboration partner Patrik Ståhl, associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SciLifeLab. Spatial transcriptomics generates information about tissue organization via microscopy and gene expression via RNA sequencing.
“This study is unique in that it is the first time we’ve applied spatial transcriptomics to fat tissue, which has a special set of characteristics and composition,” says Patrik Ståhl, the study’s third corresponding author. “We are very happy that the technology continues to contribute to solving biologically complex questions in an increasing number of research areas.”
The research has been financed by donations from the Margareta af Uggla’s foundation, Knut & Alice Wallenberg’s foundation, the Swedish Research Council, ERC-SyG SPHERES, the NovoNordisk Foundation, the MSAM consortium, the MeRIAD consortium, CIMED, the Swedish Diabetes Foundation, Region Stockholm, the Erling-Persson Family Foundation and the Strategic Research Program in Diabetes at Karolinska Institutet.
Patrik Ståhl, Nayanika Bhalla and Alma Andersson are scientific consultants to 10x Genomics which holds the IP rights to the spatial transcriptomics technology. Lovisa Franzén is employed by Astra Zeneca. No other declarations of interests have been reported.
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Occupational settings can involve exposure to loud noise, a known and preventable contributor to hearing loss. Hearing conservation programs and policies aim to protect workers from noise-induced hearing loss, but it remains unclear whether stress reactions caused by noise exposure might also lead to other negative health outcomes — possibly at sound levels below those associated with hearing impairment.
In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, published by the Acoustical Society of America through AIP Publishing, researchers from the Canadian Federal Department of Health describe how data from the Canadian Health Measures Survey do not support an association between loud noise exposure and changes in biomarkers for cardiovascular disease or outcomes, such as hypertension, myocardial infarction, or stroke.
This very large cross-sectional study reproduced expected results for hearing loss but did not support the underlying theory that noise is a serious contributor to cardiovascular disease.
“Noise is definitely capable of acting as a stressor and causing reactions in the body, and there is a large science base showing the links between stress and cardiovascular disease,” said co-author David Michaud. “But the question remains: Is occupational noise sufficient to cause stress-related illness when exposure is at levels below those known to impair hearing?”
There were associations found between noise and several biomarkers and cardiovascular outcomes in the data. However, none of these remained statistically significant after adjusting for important variables such as age, sex, and socioeconomic status.
Since many of these variables themselves are linked to cardiovascular disease and related biomarkers, the relationship between noise and adverse outcomes is complicated, and it remains difficult to assess the degree to which noise may contribute to impaired cardiovascular health.
Hearing loss induced by noise, often characterized by high-frequency hearing loss, was present in audiometry data for this study and correlated with noise exposure. While this was expected, it also indicates that self-reported loud noise exposure, defined as having to raise your voice to speak to someone at arm’s length, was likely an accurate indication of one’s exposure to loud noise.
“Our main interest was related to hearing among Canadians, not specifically to investigate whether noise exposure may contribute to cardiovascular disease,” said Michaud. “We realized we had the data to look at the relationship between noise and cardiovascular outcomes on a national level.”
While this study was not designed to look at either cardiovascular disease outcomes or classic stress biomarkers in specific settings, historical studies designed specifically to evaluate this link show mixed results. Some researchers contest there is adequate evidence for causal connections.
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Beige is considered a calming paint color, and scientists have new evidence that beige fat has a similar impact on the brain, bringing down the inflammation associated with the more common white fat and providing protection from dementia.
They have found that beige fat cells, which are typically intermingled with white fat cells in the subcutaneous fat present on “pear shaped” people, mediate subcutaneous fat’s brain protection, Dr. Alexis M. Stranahan and her colleagues report in the journal Nature Communications.
Pear-shaped people, whose weight is generally distributed more evenly, rather than “apple shaped” individuals with fat clustered around their middle and often around internal organs like the liver in the abdominal cavity, are considered less at risk for cardiometabolic problems like heart disease and diabetes, as well as cognitive decline, says Stranahan, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.
Now the scientists have shown that beige fat cells, or adipocytes, are “indispensable” to the neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory effects of subcutaneous fat, says Stranahan, the study’s corresponding author.
In fact without beige adipocytes, in the face of a high-fat diet, they saw subcutaneous fat start acting more like dangerous visceral fat, says Stranahan who reported last year in The Journal of Clinical Investigation that visceral adiposity sends a message to resident immune cells in the brain to fire up the inflammation, which ultimately damages cognition. “It’s a very different signature,” she says.
Visceral fat around the organs is mostly white fat cells, which store energy as triglycerides, which are yet another fat type found in the blood, and a risk factor for heart disease and stroke at high levels. Particularly in younger people, subcutaneous fat is a mixture of white and beige fat cells, and these beige cells are more like brown fat cells, which are packed with powerhouses called mitochondria and are efficient at using fat and sugars to produce heat in a process called thermogenesis. Exercise and cold exposure are said to enable the so-called “beiging” of white fat cells.

Hormones released after a brain injury contribute to movement problems on the left and right sides of the body, scientists from Uppsala University and elsewhere can now show in a new study in rats. The results also suggest that hormone-blocking treatments may help counteract these effects, a finding that has implications for treating people with traumatic brain injuries or stroke. The study has been published in eLife.
A stroke or injury to one side of the brain causes movement difficulties on the opposite side of the body. Scientists have previously thought that this is because nerves from one side of the brain control activity on the opposite side. But recent studies have shown that giving rats without a brain injury certain hormones can cause movement responses similar to human motor deficits on one side of the body.
“This led us to ask whether pituitary hormones might mediate in part the side-specific movement problems humans can experience after brain injury,” explains Georgy Bakalkin, Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, Uppsala University, Sweden, and a co-senior author of the study.
To investigate further, Bakalkin and the team examined the effects of a one-sided brain injury in rats that lacked the connection between the brain and nerves that regulate the hindlimbs. They found that, even without this connection, the hindlimb on the opposite side to the injury had impaired reflexes.
However, animals that lacked the pituitary gland, a hormone-producing gland connected to the brain, did not experience these problems. Two pituitary hormones ß-endorphin and Arg-vasopressin appeared to play a role. When the team gave rats without a brain injury these two hormones, the rats also developed hindlimb contraction on the right side.
Next, they tested what would happen if they gave the rats with a left-sided brain injury drugs that block the effects of these two hormones. They found that the animals did not develop right-sided movement problems. This suggests that the hormones convey side-specific signals after a brain injury and treating patients who have a similar injury with drugs that block the effects of these hormones might be beneficial.
“These observations suggest that the endocrine system through its hormones in the blood may selectively target the left and right sides of the animals’ bodies,” Bakalkin concludes. “This is an unusual phenomenon that requires further studies and verification in other animal models. We must be cautious in the interpretation of these findings and their biological implications before further research is carried out. But if future studies confirm the benefits of treatments that block these hormones, they may offer a new approach to treating movement problems following stroke or injury. Now having this published we could proceed with analysis of underlying mechanisms and a role of this phenomenon in control of our body plan and in neurological disorders.”
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Materials provided by Uppsala University. Original written by Åsa Malmberg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A study at Tampere University has identified one possible epigenetic mechanism through which the conditions at conception may affect the health of an individual in later life. The study, led by Finnish Academy Research Fellow Emma Raitoharju, shows that the family’s occupational status, income level and maternal age at conception are linked to specific molecular changes in offspring up to adulthood.
The link was detected in the DNA methylation in the region of the non-coding RNA 886 gene (nc886 gene).
“DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism that switches off gene expression. Gene expression regulates cell and tissue function. In this case, the chromosome inherited from the father is always unmethylated and expresses the nc886 gene in all humans,” says Saara Marttila, postdoctoral researcher and first author of the paper.
“The number of individuals whose maternal chromosome is also unmethylated and also expresses RNA appears to be lower in those born into families of highest socio-economic status and in those whose mothers were between 21 and 30 years old,” Marttila says.
The study shows that this early developmentally determined status of DNA methylation in the nc886 gene is stable from childhood to adulthood, throughout a 40-year follow-up. People with both chromosomes unmethylated have twice the amount of nc886 RNA in their blood, and the study also found direct evidence of this at the level of RNA expression over 30 years of follow-up.
“From a molecular biologist’s point of view, this is a beautiful example of epigenetic imprinting,” Marttila and Raitoharju say.
“However, the results also became more interesting from a health perspective when we found that people who also express the nc886 gene from their maternal chromosome — about 25 percent of the population — have higher insulin and lower glucose levels in their adolescence, and men in this group also have higher cholesterol levels,” Raitoharju explains.
“The molecular profile determined early in the fetus is therefore linked to adult health,” she continues.
The role of a single gene in the whole is small, but in this case the difference in the expression of nc886 is present in all tissues throughout life. The association with glucose and lipid metabolism suggests that this may play a role in an individual’s subsequent risk of disease.
The research group will further investigate the health effects of nc886 gene expression differences in the future.
The data used in the study included, among other things, the follow-up data from the Young Finns Study, which has been running for 40 years, and the corresponding German KORA data.
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A new model describes the coordination of beating cilia allowing to predict their functional behavior. Researchers analyzed the formation of metachronal waves in arrays of cilia and how external cues might influence them. The model allows to better understand the crucial role that cilia play in many biological processes and lays the foundation for its manipulation. This may ultimately improve the corresponding medical diagnostics and treatments, but also helps in the design of artificial systems used in microscale engineering.
Cilia are filamentous, hair-like structures that can be found on nearly all cells of the human body. Depending on the tissue, they fulfill a plethora of essential tasks, such as the transport of mucus in trachea, providing access to nutrients and inducing the left-right asymmetry during embryonic development. In their role as controllers of large-scale fluid transport, motile cilia undergo cyclic beating strokes. By this, they communicate mechanical signals to neighboring cilia and collectively create so-called metachronal waves. Typically, thousands of cilia are involved in the creation of such a wave and thus their movement needs to be well regulated to ensure — and optimize — their biological function. Due to the overwhelming complexity and multi-scale nature of the phenomenon, a mechanistic understanding of the self-organization of cilia into metachronal waves has so far been lacking. “Our model allows an in-depth understanding of the organization of cilia arrays,” explains Professor Ramin Golestanian, principal investigator of the study and Director of the Department of Living Matter Physics at the MPIDS. “For the first time, we are now able to predict the parameters and properties of a forming metachronal wave.”
Cilia behavior depends on both external and internal factors
Creating such models for cilia arrays is essential for understanding how external and internal factors may influence the function of the system. For example, changes in the concentration of certain chemicals or components in the environment induce changes at the small scale and thus might alter the emerging waves and lead to systemic dysfunction. To understand this, we need a multi-scale description of the phenomenon. Since the pioneering works of G.I. Taylor many decades ago (see ‘Further Information’), it is well known that hydrodynamic interactions between cilia can lead to coordination among them. In other words: The cilia coordination be explained due to the emerging flow from a cilium’s stroke affecting the behavior of the entire array, which ultimately causes the metachronal wave. The new model, which has been proposed by Fanlong Meng, Rachel Bennett, Nariya Uchida and Ramin Golestanian, allows to account for the conditions of many independently beating cilia, which coordinate their strokes. In their model, the authors focus on fundamental properties of cilia, such as their different beating harmonics or genomic characteristics. By combining these with features or the emerging waves, they create a powerful theoretical framework describing the cilia arrays.
Hence, the new model is able to explain both, altered properties and make predictions about the collective behavior of a ciliary array. “As this allows a better understanding of the organization on a microscale, the study lays the foundation for a multitude of potential applications” Golestanian adds. They may include the diagnostic assessment of malfunction in biological samples, new approaches for medical treatments manipulation cilia behavior or the engineering of artificial systems using metachronal waves.
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Researchers have recorded a new burst of false and misleading information about the coronavirus after a decline in the spring.In late July, Andrew Torba, the chief executive of the alternative social network Gab, claimed without evidence that members of the U.S. military who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus would face a court-martial. His post on Gab amassed 10,000 likes and shares.Two weeks earlier, the unfounded claim that at least 45,000 deaths had resulted from Covid-19 vaccines circulated online. Posts with the claim collected nearly 17,000 views on Bitchute, an alternative video platform, and at least 120,000 views on the encrypted chat app Telegram, where it was shared mostly in Spanish.Around the same time, Britain’s chief scientific adviser misstated that 60 percent of hospitalized patients had been double-vaccinated. He quickly corrected the statement, saying the 60 percent had been unvaccinated. But antivaccine groups online seized on his mistake, translating the quote into French and Italian and sharing it on Facebook, where it collected 142,000 likes and shares.Coronavirus misinformation has spiked online in recent weeks, misinformation experts say, as people who peddle in falsehoods have seized on the surge of cases from the Delta variant to spread new and recycled unsubstantiated narratives.Mentions of some phrases prone to vaccine misinformation in July jumped as much as five times the June rate, according to Zignal Labs, which tracks mentions on social media, on cable television and in print and online outlets. Some of the most prevalent falsehoods are that vaccines don’t work (up 437 percent), that they contain microchips (up 156 percent), that people should rely on their “natural immunity” instead of getting vaccinated (up 111 percent) and that the vaccines cause miscarriages (up 75 percent).Such claims had tailed off in the spring as the number of Covid cases plummeted. Compared with the beginning of the year and with 2020, there was an observable dip in the volume of misinformation in May and June. (Zignal’s research isn’t an accounting of every single piece of misinformation out there, but the spiking of certain topics can be a rough gauge of which themes are most frequently used as vehicles for misinformation.)The latest burst threatens to stymie efforts to increase vaccination rates and beat back the surge in cases. The vast majority of people testing positive for the virus in recent weeks, and nearly all of those hospitalized from the coronavirus, were unvaccinated. Public health experts, as well as doctors and nurses treating the patients, say misinformation is leading to some of the vaccine hesitancy.Disinformation researchers say the spike shows that efforts by social media platforms to crack down on misinformation about the virus have not succeeded.“These narratives are so embedded that people can keep on pushing these antivaccine stories with every new variant that’s going to come up,” said Rachel E. Moran, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. “We’re seeing it with Delta, and we’re going to see it with whatever comes next.”In the past few weeks, the vast majority of the most highly engaged social media posts containing coronavirus misinformation were from people who had risen to prominence by questioning the vaccines in the past year.In July, the right-wing commentator Candace Owens jumped on the misstatement from Britain’s scientific adviser. “This is shocking!” she wrote. “60% of people being admitted to the hospital with #COVID19 in England have had two doses of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the government’s chief scientific adviser.”After the scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, corrected himself, Ms. Owens added the correct information at the bottom of her Facebook post. But the post was liked or shared over 62,000 times — two-thirds of its total interactions — in the three hours before her update, a New York Times analysis found. In all, the rumor collected 142,000 likes and shares on Facebook, most of them coming from Ms. Owens’s post, according to a report by the Virality Project, a consortium of misinformation researchers from outfits like the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika.When reached for comment, Ms. Owens said in an email: “Unfortunately, I’m not interested in The New York Times. The people that follow me don’t take your hit pieces seriously.”Also in July, Thomas Renz, a lawyer, appeared in a video claiming that 45,000 people had died from coronavirus vaccines. The claim, since debunked, relies on unverified information from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a government database. The baseless claim had been included in a lawsuit that Mr. Renz filed on behalf of an anonymous “whistle-blower,” in coordination with America’s Frontline Doctors — a right-wing group that spread misinformation about the pandemic in the past.Mr. Renz’s video got more than 19,000 views on Bitchute. The unfounded claim was repeated by the top Spanish-language Telegram channels, Facebook groups and the conspiracy website Infowars, collecting over 120,000 views across the platforms, according to the Virality Project.In an email, Mr. Renz said his practice had “performed the due diligence necessary” to believe in the accuracy of the allegations in the lawsuit he had filed. “We actually do not believe that the Biden administration is responsible for this, rather we believe that President Biden, like President Trump before him, was misled by the same group of conflicted bureaucrats,” Mr. Renz said.On Thursday, Mr. Torba, the Gab chief executive, claimed that he was “getting flooded” with text messages from members of the military who said they would be court-martialed if they refused a coronavirus vaccine. Though military leaders have pushed to vaccinate troops and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin will seek to mandate coronavirus vaccines by September, there is no evidence that the military plans to court-martial troops who do not get vaccinated.Mr. Torba’s post collected 10,000 likes and shares on Gab, according to data from the Virality Project. Documents that he pushed on Gab’s news site to help service members request vaccine exemptions, including for religious reasons, also contained misinformation.One of the documents made use of an old antivaccine talking point that aborted fetal cell lines were used in the development of the Covid-19 vaccines — but Catholic and anti-abortion groups have said the vaccines are “morally acceptable.” The documents reached up to 2.2 million followers on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle data..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I’m telling the truth,” Mr. Torba said in an email. “Your Facebook-funded ‘fact checkers’ like Graphika are wrong and are the people peddling disinformation here.”Facebook, which has become more aggressive at enforcing its coronavirus misinformation policy in the past year, remains a popular destination for people discussing the misinformation.Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, found over 200 public and private Facebook groups, with around 400,000 members, that were dedicated to antivaccine discussion. The groups, which The Times reviewed, added 13,000 members in the last seven days, according to Media Matters.Many of the most popular posts in the groups did not include explicit falsehoods. One was an image of a Scooby Doo character unmasking a ghost with a caption that read, “Let’s see what makes you scarier than all the other variants.” The unmasking revealed the logos of MSNBC and CNN, implying that the cable channels were overstating the severity of the Delta variant.But like the comments on many of the other pages, those beneath the Scooby Doo item did contain unfounded claims. They also included calls to violence.“China is completely to blame,” one comment said. “We’re going to have to fight them eventually, so I advocate a preemptive nuclear strike.”Facebook said that it removed confirmed violations of its coronavirus misinformation policy from comments, and that it had connected people with authoritative information about the virus.“We will continue to enforce against any account or group that violates our Covid-19 and vaccine policies,” Aaron Simpson, a Facebook spokesman, said in an email.Ms. Moran, the researcher, predicted there would be a “natural attention cycle” for this new round of misinformation. “After this spike, like with the original Covid strain, we’ll see it simmer down to normal levels of misinformation for a little while,” she said.But the coronavirus misinformation will not go away anytime soon, Ms. Moran predicted. “Unfortunately it’s not spikes and troughs, but steady levels of misinformation,” she said.Jacob Silver

After losing his daughter Norah in May 2018, Ross has been trying to help other dads in his position. He set up both Nine4Norah, which aims to raise awareness about baby loss, and the Dads and Lads Network, to tackle mental health issues.Ross has raised more than £65,000 by organising walks and events for both campaign groups. The money has been donated to mental health and baby loss charities.If you have been affected by anything in this story. Please go to BBC Action Line.Video by Gem O’Reilly

A new paper comparing the ability to match pitch and duration in speech and song is providing valuable insight into vocal imitation deficits for children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
The results show how individuals with ASD perform quite differently in two different categories of pitch imitation, a finding that has broad implications when thinking about the challenges associated with autism, including difficulties when interacting with others and making social connections.
“This project shows that some of the conclusions we may want to draw about autism from other tasks may not be as widely generalizable as we think,” says Peter Pfordresher, a professor of psychology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study, which was led by Fang Liu, associate professor of psychology and clinical language sciences at the University of Reading.
The research team found that autistic children and adults were better at imitating and holding relative pitch than they were with absolute pitch across both speech and music domains. There’s a significant distinction between the two that is illustrated using the melody associated with the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Absolute pitch is the specific note associated with each syllable in a song. Think about the seven notes you would produce when singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Absolute pitch is the ability to sing each note correctly, essentially matching the notes after hearing the tune. This definition differs from what musical performers would call absolute, or sometimes, perfect pitch, which refers to the ability to identify or sing a note without an immediate reference.
Relative pitch, meanwhile, is the pitch change from one note to the next, or the interval separating the pitch in the first syllable of “Mary” from the word’s second syllable.