James Hawdon, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech, USA, has spent many years studying online hate, including hate speech and other forms of cyberviolence. His work has examined how hate speech gets produced, how the hate groups and individuals that produce it become radicalised, how it spreads across the internet, what effects it has upon its producers and the targets of their hate, as well as what societies can to do to prevent it.
Extremism is as old as civilisation, but those advocating hate can now spread their ideas more widely using the Internet. Billions of users now take part in a global flow of information and many nations, such as China, now try to restrict this potent flow as they see it as a political or cultural rival to orthodox power structures. …
Words, words, words. They’re all around us, on toothpaste tubes, cell phones, cereal packets and television screens — and that’s before we leave the house! We read thousands of words every day and take our human ability to use language very much for granted. Yet language comprehension is a highly sophisticated process. Aided by technologies which track eye movement and brain activity as subjects respond to language stimuli, psycholinguistics expert Pia Knoeferle of Berlin’s Humboldt University studies how meaning derives from context and the interplay between linguistic and visual information processing.
Cutting edge technology is helping researchers track eye movement and brain activity to the millisecond in a bid to understand how we process language and extract meaning from what we see, read and hear. One of the leaders in the field is psycholinguistics expert Dr Pia Knoeferle from Berlin’s Humboldt University, where she studies how humans learn, use, and understand language. …
Professor Jørgen Jahnsen and PhD student Kristian Espeland of Akershus University Hospital and University of Oslo are responsible for a new clinical trial which aims to improve symptoms and control the inflammation of Crohn’s disease using Gliolan medication in combination with blue-light photopheresis. This approach will selectively cause the death of pro-inflammatory cells which contribute to the inflammatory bowel disease, whilst showing minimal short- and long-term side effects.
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) occurs in two main forms: Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis. Both types of inflammatory bowel disease are chronic, immune-mediated diseases affecting the gastrointestinal tract, particularly the bowel.
The exact cause of Crohn’s disease is unknown, but there are several factors hypothesised to be involved, including genes, autoimmune responses to the body’s tissues, previous gastrointestinal infections or an imbalance in the gut bacteria. The underlying pathology of Crohn’s disease is a T-cell-mediated response (T-cells are important for the activation of immune cells), characterised by an overproduction of pro-inflammatory components, i.e. activated hyperproliferative T-cells. …
The use of psychedelics as a tool to aid psychotherapy is controversial, even in 2020. But some psychiatrists think psychedelics could be used effectively and safely to enhance the treatment of patients with a range of mental health issues. Consultant psychiatrist Ben Sessa is one such doctor, and he has been conducting research and gathering evidence in this area since the early 2000s.
The Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research aims to bridge the gap between the many academic disciplines that have important contributions to make within the field of psychedelic studies. …
In Somaliland, a northern area of Somalia that operates as an independent country, many of the population rely on frankincense for income. Frankincense is a resin derived from the Boswellia tree. However, the trees are being overharvested, and locals have found themselves in a poverty trap. Despite a huge increase in the price of frankincense on the global market, harvesters see little financial benefit. …
The Medical Research Foundation (the Medical Research Council’s charitable foundation) believes that investing in long-term research projects — research that will not just be valuable now but also beneficial later — is the key to effective medical advancement. The Foundation steps in to fund the most promising health research that will make the biggest difference, filling gaps left by institutions and the government.
Established as part of the Medical Research Council of the UK in 1926, the Medical Research Foundation has been providing funding to advance medical research in areas that receive little or no support for over 90 years. …
In the plant kingdom, disease is an exception rather than a rule. That is because plants have an immune system. A plants’ immune system consists of several signalling pathways that act together to counteract microbial pathogens. However, there is not enough known about the subcellular pathways that allow proteins to move within and out of the plant cell and ward off bacterial plant pathogens. Dr Clemencia Rojas, Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Arkansas, investigates how various plant proteins function in different subcellular compartments, to defend against bacteria.
In nature, plants coexist with other organisms, including microbes. Plant-microbe interactions can sometimes be mutually beneficial, but at other times be damaging, leading to plant disease. However, disease is generally an exception rather than a rule, because plants have an innate immune system that allows them to defend against potential disease-causing microbes. Plant immunity is complex and hundreds of proteins participate in this process. Plant immune proteins interact in multiple configurations and also interact with proteins produced by pathogens. Understanding how specific immune proteins interact and move within and out of the plant cell to combat pathogenic bacteria, is the focus of research efforts by Dr Clemencia Rojas and her collaborators. …
The work of Dr Jennifer Geddes-McAlister at the University of Guelph investigates the interactions between hosts and pathogens to uncover new treatment options to combat infections. Her lab uses a range of techniques centered around proteomics, the study of proteins, to progress knowledge of fungal and bacterial infections in humans and agricultural crops. The results of this research can be applied to novel treatment approaches to improve human health, and have economic implications for the cereal crop industry.
The recent rise in antimicrobial resistance presents a major threat to human health. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, antimicrobial drugs — particularly antibiotics — have been an effective first line of defence against many infections, from the trivial to the life-threatening. Unfortunately, pathogens are catching up. …
Professor Alexander Steinkasserer is based at the Department of Immune Modulation, University Hospital, Erlangen. His research interests are focused on the immune system, with the long-term aim to develop new therapeutic strategies for patients suffering from autoimmune disorders or in need of transplantation. Along with his colleagues at the department of Immune Modulation, Professor Steinkasserer has shed much light on the involvement of a protein, CD83, in regulating immune responses.
Immune responses are constantly being monitored by the body; an excessive immune response can lead to accidental damage of the body’s own tissues but a response that is too weak will fail to fight off the threat composed by pathogens like bacteria/viruses or cancer cells. …
Dr Aisling Caffrey is an Associate Professor of Health Outcomes at the College of Pharmacy, University of Rhode Island. For over a decade, Dr Caffrey has been studying the treatment of diseases in real-world clinical practice, an area Dr Caffrey has termed ‘treatment epidemiology’. Dr Caffrey’s expertise is in comparative effectiveness and safety research, where she studies the benefits and harms of healthcare interventions, including medications administered in hospital or long-term care settings, and prescriptions dispensed in outpatient settings.
Epidemiology can be defined as ‘the study of what comes upon the people’ (from the Greek epi-demos-logos) and is best known as the science underpinning public health. Historically, epidemiology has focused on the surveillance of disease, also referred to as ‘disease epidemiology’, studying what level of disease occurs and in which populations. Disease epidemiology identifies changes in disease over time, as well as risk factors for disease occurrence, and disease prevention efforts. As science and medicine have evolved, a natural extension of disease epidemiology is the study of how diseases are treated, a subject area which Dr Aisling Caffrey, University of Rhode Island, has coined ‘treatment epidemiology’. This field of study has a number of different names, including pharmacoepidemiology, health services research, real-world evidence, outcomes research, health outcomes research, or pharmaceutical/device health outcomes research. Most simply, this field studies the effects of healthcare interventions to treat disease, and all these other terms fall under the umbrella of ‘treatment epidemiology’. …
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