What the scientists are saying…
The dangers of doomscrolling
Just under half of adults in the UK use social media to keep up with the news, but research suggests that even a couple of minutes of “doomscrolling” a day can be harmful to our well-being. Psychologists from the University of Essex asked volunteers to spend a few minutes on YouTube or Twitter every day, reading or watching news related to Covid-19, and to report their mood. They then compared them to a control group that had not absorbed such news. The results showed that as little as two minutes’ exposure to bad news about the pandemic was linked to significant reductions in mental well-being and optimism; but that “kindness-scrolling” – exposure to heart-warming stories related to the pandemic – had no negative effect. Although the results were not particularly surprising. Dr Kathryn Buchanan, who led the study, said they reinforced the importance of being “mindful of one’s own news consumption”, especially on social media.
We’re wired to avoid shortcuts
When navigating a city, it isn’t always easy to find the quickest routes between two points, and according to a new study, our brains may not be wired to choose them. Researchers from MIT analysed data on the movements of 14,380 people in two cities in the US, and found that pedestrians tend to opt for the “pointiest path” – the one that keeps them most facing their destination – even it means they end up walking further. This applied both in Boston, which has a chaotic street layout, and San Francisco, which is grid-based. Known as “vector-based navigation”, the strategy is also used by most animals, studies have found. The theory is that choosing the “pointiest path” may not be efficient, but it requires less mental effort. “There appears to be a trade-off that allows computational power in our brain to be used for other things – 30,000 years ago to avoid a lion, or now, to avoid a perilous SUV,” said Prof Carlo Ratti, the senior author of the study. “Vector-based navigation does not produce the shortest path, but it’s close enough to the shortest path, and it’s very simple to compute it.”
Pig-to-human organ transplant
Animal-to-human transplants have long been complicated by the body’s tendency to reject organs from other species. There are now signs, however, that using genetically modified organs could be the way forward. For a study in New York, surgeons recently conducted a transplant using a kidney from a pig that had been engineered not to produce alpha-gal – a sugar the human immune system attacks, causing organ rejection. The operation was carried out on a woman who had suffered brain death, and whose family had consented to her being on a ventilator for the purpose of the trial. The pig’s kidney wasn’t inserted into her body, but was attached to blood vessels in her upper leg, and monitored for 54 hours. The surgeons found that there was no sign of immediate rejection, and that the organ functioned normally, filtering waste and producing urine. “It just looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor,” said Dr Robert Montgomery, the lead investigator on the study, which has yet to be peer reviewed. “It was better than I think we even expected.” Although he acknowledges that such procedures raise ethical questions, he points out that, currently, 40% of transplant patients die waiting for human organs to become available. “We use pigs as a source of food, we use pigs for medicinal uses – for valves, for medication,” he said. “I think it’s not that different.”
Statins may cut Covid death risk
People who take statins are slightly less likely to die of Covid-19 than people who are not on the cholesterol-lowering drug, a study has found. Researchers analysed health data from almost a million over-45s living in Stockholm, and found that those who had been prescribed statins before the pandemic were about 12% less likely to have died of Covid during the study period – between March and November 2020 – than those not on statins. They stressed that more research would be required to show that the association was causal, but said that their findings raised the possibility that statin treatment has “a modest preventive therapeutic effect on Covid-19 mortality”.